Who does FEMA help, and who pays?
The catastrophic wildfires that made this a month of extraordinary losses in the southland have brought attention to FEMA and its role in helping states respond to disaster. President Trump has suggested that there should be conditions on FEMA aid to California, but instead of building codes, fuel reduction projects or firefighting equipment, has mentioned voter ID laws and the diversion of water from the north of the state to the south.
Although FEMA is not the only source of disaster relief funding in the US, it is the largest. The Carnegie Endowment’s Disaster Dollar Database covers a decade from 2015 to 2024. It reports $50 billion spent by HUD and $64 billion from FEMA.
FEMA aid is divided into two categories: direct payments to survivors under the Individuals and Households Program (IHP), and Public Assistance (PA), which funds community rebuilding. The three top states for IHP are Florida, Texas, and Louisiana, each having received over two billion dollars in IHP money over the last decade. During the same period, Californians received just over $300 million.
PA funding has also flowed mostly to states and territories visited by hurricanes: Puerto Rico has received over $21 billion after hurricanes and earthquakes, with more planned. Florida and Louisiana follow at $7.7 and $6.2 billion. California was next on the list at $3.7 billion, followed by the Virgin Islands at $2.9 billion and Texas at $2.8 billion
The Carnegie study also points out that aid does not look the same in Puerto Rico and California, and calls assessments “notoriously subjective, especially in undervaluing the damage to homes of low-income households.” Average payments vary, from $876 in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Fiona, to $4,995 in Georgia after severe storms in 2017, and $15,500 in California after the fires of 2020.
If you divide the totals by population, you will find that during those ten years, FEMA spent about $100 per person in California and $461 in Florida. Californians, through income taxes, contribute far more in total to the public coffers ($360 billion) than residents of any other state: almost twice New York and more than twice Texas.