Read With Me: The FEMA Act of 2025 - Public Assistance
Part II: Division B, FEMA Reforms Title I - Public Assistance Reforms
Continuing where we left off, the next section (Division B) of the FEMA Act of 2025 deals with reforming FEMA programs. This post is going to cover Title I, which focuses on the Public Assistance program. If you are a reader who doesn’t follow FEMA closely, a quick refresher on Public Assistance (borrowed from an upcoming data resource from Urban):
After federally declared disasters, FEMA provides financial assistance to households and to state, local, tribal and territorial governments (and some non-profits) to defray the costs of response and recovery. In broad terms, FEMA provides Public Assistance grants for public actions like removing disaster debris, conducting search-and-rescue operations, and repairing disaster-damaged public infrastructure, among other efforts. It also provides Individual Assistance grants to people and households for their recovery needs, such as temporary lodging, home repair, and personal property replacement
[We will cover the Individual Assistance portion of the FEMA Act in the next post].
Public Assistance (PA) grants are a major component of overall FEMA spending, and a huge driver of state-and-local interaction with the agency. Disaster experts will constantly remind people that FEMA doesn’t lead or make decisions about response and recovery. Their most important function is as a checkbook, a vehicle through which public resources get transferred to places in-need.
Broadly speaking, I would summarize the intended outcomes of PA reforms in the FEMA Act as:
Speeding up the delivery of federal funds;
Reducing stress on SLTT governments and their staff;
Expanding access to PA funds by rural and economically distressed communities; and
Incentivizing hazard mitigation investments by SLTT governments.
There are numerous significant reforms to public assistance programs laid out in the FEMA Act, and I am not going to come close to summarizing all of them. But here are some major highlights:
Section 101 amends the Stafford Act to make PA funds up-front rather than ex-post (reimbursement based) grants, and significantly changes the way that project-level PA grants are determined. This is perhaps the most significant change in the entire bill, in my opinion, and something that is sorely needed. In its current setup, localities managing disaster recovery are often forced to draw down all of their emergency cash reserves and/or take out debt to fund recovery projects, then engage in a long and often torturous reimbursement conversation with FEMA. It creates tons of obvious problems…for example, communities face enormous financial strains during recovery because they have to carry these costs up-front, draining emergency reserves and sometimes requiring them to issue debt. This is doubly true for smaller and lower-resource communities, many of whom just choose not to apply for FEMA resources to avoid the hassle. The reimbursement process also generates a lot of the negative feelings towards FEMA and government red tape, which undoubtedly creates tensions and distrust in other areas. I’ve also interviewed many public officials who point to the strain of the back-and-forth with FEMA as helping drive staff burnout post-disaster, leading to staff turn over - an underappreciated barrier to recovery.
There are lots of details worth discussing in future posts, especially the establishment of federal cost-share (which adjusts based on mitigation activities!) and the accelerated timeline (120 days from cost-estimate to grant availability) for funds to get out-the-door from FEMA.
Section 103 instructs the FEMA Administrator to take into account whether a community is economically distressed or a rural area, potentially expanding the number of communities that would be eligible for PA assistance.
Section 104 targets delays in PA projects sometimes caused by the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Section 105 creates a unified review process for compliance with federal environmental and historic preservation laws. It won’t surprise anyone that federal spending on public assistance projects tends to trigger NEPA and historic preservation review, which can cause significant delays in project approval. These reforms would cut a lot of those requirements for projects that are largely about restoring what was lost, i.e. on ‘already disturbed land.’ Critically that would include changes to buildings to bring them up to current code…I’ll be very curious to hear from my historic preservation colleagues on this section of the bill.
Section 106 amends the Stafford Act to allow State and Indian tribal governments to request a lump-sum block grant to cover the costs of small disasters, rather than receiving PA grants on a project-by-project basis. This is another important change that, to-me, would hugely benefit smaller communities and states with fewer large-scale disasters, and who do not have the kinds of staff capacity needed to manage a slew of relatively small-dollar PA projects.
Section 109 instructs the three federal agencies with the largest footprint in disaster recovery - FEMA, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the Small Business Administration (SBA) to create a streamlined (unified?) process for collecting preliminary damage assessment data.
Section 117 sets a 120 day timeline for reimbursement of costs for emergency repair work.
These are just a few of the highlights and the sections that stood out to me…there are many more changes proposed, some that fly right over my head (who can explain costs modernization to me?) For those who want to dig deeper, I’ve found two resources to be helpful in understanding the changes being proposed:
The National Association of Counties (NACo) webinar ‘Unlocking Federal Reform: What the FEMA Act Means for Counties”
The T&I Committee’s own section-by-section summary of the bill.
Up next, Individual Assistance.