A New Politics of Federal Disaster Declarations?

Understanding a key lever of administrative power in Trump 2.0

This year I will be dedicating lots of brain and page space to understanding the ‘new normal’ of disaster governance in the U.S. under the 2nd Trump Administration. As I wrote in December, reform is in the air - but whose vision of reform will ultimately win out? Congress’s? The FEMA Advisory Council’s? The authors of Project 2025?

One thing we do know is that the Trump Administration’s ability to implement reforms is limited by Congress, who has created legislation and programs that the executive branch is expected to implement. And section 506 of the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 prohibits the Secretary of DHS from “substantially or significantly reduc[ing]” the capabilities of FEMA without legislative action. And thus far, Congress hasn’t shown too much interest in cutting down the size and role of FEMA.

That won’t stop the administration from using whatever tools they have at their disposal to advance their agenda. One of those is staffing - this week we heard that FEMA had resumed layoffs (or, technically, resumed not renewing CORE contracts) after a temporary pause due to winter storms. We’ve also seen the Secretary of DHS assert greater control over FEMA spending.

Presidential Disaster Declarations: Opening the Federal Resource Tap

Another essential tool is the presidential disaster declaration. A presidential disaster declaration is a formal determination by the President under the Stafford Act that a disaster has overwhelmed state and local resources, thereby turning on the tap of federal disaster programs like individual assistance, public assistance, and hazard mitigation grants. A declaration begins with a request from the governor or executive of the state, tribe or territory where the disaster occurred, and is then either approved or denied by the President (via his DHS Secretary and FEMA Administrator). While the power to make disaster declarations ultimately sits with the President, FEMA has historically relied on financial thresholds to help determine whether a disaster has overwhelmed state and local capacity. For instance, if a state wants to be eligible for federal public assistance grants in 2026 the disaster would typically need to:

1. Exceed $1.94 per resident in total damages, i.e. a disaster in a state with 3 million residents would need to experience a disaster with more than $5.82 million in direct damages;

2. Individual counties would need to meet a threshold of $4.86 in damages per resident to have public assistance funding activated.¹

While exceeding these thresholds is not a guarantee of a declaration, they do provide an important and standardized benchmark for determining whether a state and county is likely to receive federal support. This isn’t to say that all declaration requests are accepted; looking at FEMA’s data on disaster declarations from 2010-2023 (the last year where denial data was available), the number of denied requests ranges anywhere from 5% in 2020 to 29% in 2015, with an average denial rate of 16%.

Major disaster declarations, emergency declarations, and denied declaration requests by year (both DR and EM), 2010-2025. Source: Open FEMA. Note: declaration denials not available for years 2024-2025. Created with Flourish.

Although we do not have data on disaster denials for 2024-2025, observers have noted an uptick in denials and the length of time it takes for requests to be decided.

There are lots of reasons that FEMA might deny a declaration request, even if damages from an event exceed the benchmarks. For example, if a state has already experienced multiple smaller disasters in the previous 12 months - and has thus depleted its disaster fund - they are more likely to receive a declaration. A disaster that causes concentrated damages, as opposed to scattered across many different jurisdictions, is also more likely to be declared. And in some instances the federal and state government disagree on the true cost of damages. Ultimately the authority to decide whether or not a disaster is declared rests solely with the President, however, and denial letters are frustratingly vague in their language...they almost always argue that the disaster’s damage “was not of such severity and magnitude as to be beyond the capabilities of the state and affected local governments.”

Have Partisan Politics Entered the Picture?

If these observations prove to be true and the number of disaster denials have indeed gone up, one explanation is that the Trump Administration has decided to place greater responsibility on the shoulders of state and local governments for disaster relief and recovery by increasing the thresholds for declarations. In fact, these were exactly the kind of administrative changes that FEMA leadership was considering in the early days of the 2nd Trump Administration.

But then there are messages like this from President Trump:

Notably these messages, and others like them, came on the same days that the President denied disaster declaration requests in states controlled by the Democratic Party like Illinois, Vermont and Maryland. And in Arkansas, President Trump partially reversed a decision to deny disaster aid to the state after speaking on the phone with the Republican Governor (and former Trump Press Secretary) Sarah Sanders.

Is the President using partisan political support as a metric for determining declaration eligibility? Democratic lawmakers certainly think so. In Colorado FEMA has denied requests for declarations for the Lee and Elk fires and the Western Colorado floods that caused at least $41 million in damages - well exceeding the typical disaster thresholds. The state’s Democratic Governor has accused President Trump of “playing political games” and others have linked the denial of disaster funding (along with vetoing funding for a water infrastructure project) to the state’s imprisonment of a court clerk who illegally searched for evidence of voter fraud after the 2020 elections.

The Lee Fire burned nearly 140 thousand acres in northwest Colorado in 2025

A similar story is playing out in Maryland, after FEMA denied federal disaster aid to Allegany and Garrett Counties after flooding caused more than $33 million in damages in May of 2025 - an amount that is nearly triple the typical statewide threshold of $11.7 million.

A year into Trump’s second term, we don’t have enough data to know whether these patterns of disaster denials are driven by a commitment to ‘downsizing’ FEMA’s role, partisan politics, or some mixture of those (and other) factors. It is clear, however, that the administration intends to use the tools it has - like disaster declarations - to achieve its goals. And it is yet another example of how governance in the U.S. is often based on a set of norms (don’t distribute disaster aid based on partisan politics) rather than rules. It will be interesting to watch whether Congress or a future administration decides to codify tools like disaster thresholds to protect against such moves in the future.

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1. An important side note…the use of statewide thresholds are one reason why rural communities sometimes feel abandoned after disasters. A large disaster affecting mostly rural communities will often fail to exceed the statewide threshold, especially in larger and more populated states. That means that those communities will not receive the kinds of federal support that urban and suburban jurisdictions typically do, and have to rely instead on often less well-resourced state agencies or non-profit groups.