The DHS Shutdown Will Starve Local Disaster Response

Congress left for recess last week without reaching an agreement to fund the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of, among other offices, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and somewhat incongruously, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Democrats and Republicans remain leagues apart on their primary sticking point, ending the deadly and inhumane uses of force and detention against U.S. citizens and migrant communities. That also leaves FEMA without money for payroll and non-emergency programs.

The situation at the disaster response agency was already precarious — the office has had three acting administrators in less than a year; cut thousands of staff with another 10,000 on the chopping block; and has blocked and delayed funding to its local partners, including pausing the issuance of its Emergency Management Performance Grants, which are used for staffing, training, and equipping state-, city-, and tribal-level teams, pending updated population statistics post deportations.

Even so, FEMA remains technically capable of fulfilling its congressionally mandated duties due to an estimated $7 billion that remains in its Disaster Relief Fund. Still, the shutdown has placed renewed scrutiny on DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s oversight of the agency. It has also elevated existing questions about what FEMA is doing alongside CBP and ICE in the first place.

To learn more about how the effects of the shutdown are trickling down through FEMA’s local operations, I spoke with Noah Patton, the director of disaster recovery at the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, which has publicly condemned the use of FEMA funding as a “political bargaining chip to allow ICE and CBP to continue their ongoing and imminent threats to the areas where they operate.”

When asked for comment, a FEMA spokesperson directed me to a DHS press release titled “Another Democrat Government Shutdown Dramatically Hurts America’s National Security.”

The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Why is the DHS shutdown an issue you care about as a low-income housing organization? What are the stakes?

How the country responds to and recovers from disasters is inextricably linked to the issue of affordable housing. Often, households with the lowest incomes are in areas with the highest risk of disaster impacts. Our system has a lot of cracks in it. If you don’t have a rainy day fund for such things; if you’re someone who is not fully insured; if you have non-permanent employment — when disasters occur, you’re going to be hit the hardest. At the same time, you’ll receive the least assistance.

That not only exacerbates existing economic issues but also reduces the affordable housing stock available to the lowest-income households, as units are physically removed from the market when they’re destroyed or damaged by disasters.

What disasters are we talking about specifically at the moment? Are reimbursements for, say, the recent winter storms impacted by the shutdown?

Typically, when the [Disaster Relief Fund] is low, FEMA will implement critical needs funding. It pauses reimbursements for non-specific disaster-response projects and reallocates funds to preserve operational capacity for direct disaster response. That hasn’t happened yet because the DRF has sufficient funds. On the administrative end, reimbursements will be processed as we go along.

Is there anything you’re concerned about in the short term with regard to the DHS shutdown? Or has NLIHC pushed for the depoliticization of FEMA funding because of the cascading effects for the people you advocate for?

FEMA is okay as of right now. The need to stop ICE and CBP and the violence in communities across the country is taking precedence. We appreciate Congress’ interest in ensuring FEMA is adequately funded, but the DHS appropriations bill is not the only vehicle for providing FEMA funding. That’s why we’ve been pushing for a disaster-specific supplemental spending bill. That bill could also have longer-term assistance under HUD for places like Alaska [following Typhoon Halong], Los Angeles [following the January 2025 wildfires], and St. Louis [following the May 2025 tornado].

Maybe you’ve already answered my next question: How has NLIHC been navigating the tension between condemning ICE and CBP, while at the same time pushing for FEMA funding?

We have been big supporters of the House’s FEMA Act: the Fixing Emergency Management for Americans Act. It’s a bill that would remove FEMA from DHS, reestablish it as an independent agency as it was prior to 2003, and implement reforms to expand access to federal assistance for households with the lowest incomes after disasters. We’ve been supporters of that bill since it came out.

I’d also say, in the short term, I don’t see a huge amount of impact on the disaster response and recovery systems. It’s worth pausing on that, given everything going on with ICE and CBP.

What else is on your minds right now at NLIHC?

Much of the work we’re doing stems from the rapid, forced decentralization of the federal government’s emergency management capability — because emergency response and recovery now falls to the states. But many states lack robust disaster response and recovery programs. The state of Oklahoma, for example — I think their Emergency Management Office is 90% federally funded.

The administration’s pull-back of state-level emergency management performance grants and the coordination FEMA was providing on that will get the ball rolling; as we’ve seen in other disasters, the ball ends at households with the lowest incomes being the most impacted. We’re trying to head that off by coordinating advocates at the state and local levels to work with their local governments and facilitate more robust conversations on emergency management and related programs. A good example of that would be what we’re seeing in Washington State after the flooding from the atmospheric rivers. They have not received a disaster declaration from FEMA, so they’re not receiving federal assistance, but people are experiencing homelessness due to those floods. We’re working with folks there to craft programs that ensure that, in the absence of federal assistance, some form of aid continues.

For many years, the federal government was heavily involved in emergency management and served as the main coordinator. They were the source of the vast, vast, vast majority of funding. Now we’re looking toward a world where that’s less true, and where state-level mechanisms will be all the more important. Even if the FEMA Act is passed, it encourages state-level systems to emerge for responding to and recovering from disasters. We’re adding a focus to that state-level work that we didn’t necessarily need before.

The Trump administration has justified its defunding of FEMA by saying, “Well, disaster response is local, so this should be the responsibility of the states.” But like you were saying, places like Oklahoma get all their support from the federal government to begin with.

They always say, “Disaster response is local” because operationally, it needs to be. You’re not going to have a FEMA guy parachute in and start telling the local firefighters and cops what to do; that’s best handled by the folks who are on the ground and are familiar with their communities.

But it’s wrong to say, “If all disaster response is local, then why are we even involved?” FEMA provides the coordination and additional resources that are pivotal. Federal resources are allocated to local officials to respond to the disaster. The salaries of all those local emergency managers — at least, a high percentage of them — that money comes from the feds.

If the shutdown continues much longer, would that be another impact: local emergency managers not receiving their salaries?

The grant-making fight is separate. The administration is trying to slow down the flow of [emergency management preparedness grants] to state governments. Several states have filed high-profile lawsuits to obtain the grants that the federal government arbitrarily paused. Regardless of any shutdown, that will still be an issue.