FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell has highlighted the urgent need for additional funding from Congress by December or January to sustain the agency's disaster response and recovery efforts. Without the necessary funding, FEMA may have to limit its support to immediate disasters and temporarily halt longer-term recovery initiatives.
Currently, FEMA has sufficient funding to address the impacts of hurricanes Helene and Milton, as well as provide ongoing assistance to survivors of previous storms and wildfires across the nation. However, Criswell emphasized that without a supplemental budget, sustaining these recovery efforts will become challenging.
As of now, FEMA has access to a budget of slightly over $20 billion. Criswell mentioned that the agency will evaluate the extent of additional funding required and plans to approach Congress for the necessary support during the upcoming winter months.
In response to the impending hurricane Milton, FEMA has already deployed over 1,000 incident management personnel to Florida, which constitutes approximately 9% of its total workforce. Additional FEMA staff are expected to be dispatched to the region before the hurricane makes landfall.
Furthermore, there are currently around 7,500 federal government personnel deployed nationwide to assist with disaster response efforts, with 4,000 of them being FEMA staff. A significant number of these personnel are concentrated in North Carolina to aid in the recovery process following hurricane Helene.
