Flagler Emergency Management Director Jonathan Lord Warns of a Different Disaster Ahead: the Vanishing of FEMA Money

Emergency management’s mantra is simple: Be prepared. Flagler County Emergency Management Director Jonathan Lord brought that message to the Flagler County Commission on Monday as part of his pre-hurricane season briefing. This time, it had nothing to do with storms. It had to do with the rapidly changing or diminishing of federal assistance in emergencies as the president redefines the role of the Federal Emergency Management Administration. Or possibly eliminates it.

With or without FEMA, Lord cautioned the commission, local governments must be prepared to assume more costs of recovery than they have in the past, especially if the federal government declares fewer disasters, as appears to be the plan. Fewer declarations will mean far less reimbursements and far fewer grants for innumerable projects and services local governments depend on in the recovery phase of what are becoming routine climate disasters.

“I know this has been in the news a lot FEMA changes, and that is something I am watching, literally change hour by hour on certain days,” Lord said. “Big, big changes, potentially to what FEMA is or isn’t at the federal level. Our main concern, obviously, is the ability to continue to receive funding after major disasters.”

Lord noted the president’s executive order in January creating the Federal Emergency Management Agency Review Council to “basically advise the President on the ability of FEMA to address and solve disasters in our country, and then make recommendations. That group meets for the first time later this week.” 

The president signed a subsequent order called Achieving Efficiency Through State and Local Preparedness. “The executive branch, particularly, looked at the suite of grants provided by the Department of Homeland Security,” Lord said. The administration canceled the $750 million Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program (BRIC), and it reduced  the multi-billion-dollar Hazard Mitigation and Grant Program many Florida communities relied on. (Politico this month reported that the president halted awards under the mitigation program in April.)

“We did not have any projects under that grant. So Flagler County did not lose out,” Lord said of BRIC. “There were other jurisdictions in Florida, throughout the country, that did lose out on that,” including ongoing projects that were ordered halted. 

There may be changes to FEMA’s disaster grant programs. “So the public assistance grant programs, the ones that make us partially whole after we have a large disaster, the President has hinted that he wants greater ownership at the state and local government level,” Lord said, “and what my gut tells me we’ll most likely see is it will be harder for us to get declared after a disaster. So storms like the ones we’ve seen the last few years, where we didn’t really get hurricane-level impacts, but we had very bad tropical storm type impacts in our community, it is possible that we would not get federal declarations for those types of events.”

That means no federal money for repair or reconstruction of the Flagler Beach pier, whose imminent reconstruction depends on money secured after it was severely damaged by successive hurricanes causing tropical storm conditions on the barrier island since 2016, even though the pier and Flagler County were at no time struck by an actual hurricane. 

It also means no money for dune reconstruction and beach renourishment, even though, since 2016, Flagler County has secured millions of dollars in FEMA dollars to repair its beaches. It may mean no new money for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ beach-renourishment project in Flagler Beach after a severe storm, if there is no declared emergency, even though the beaches might be ravaged. 

It also means that repair loans to individuals and reimbursement for other government infrastructure will no longer be available. 

“It is very much going back the way it was about 10-15 years ago, it was much harder to get declared for a federal disaster declaration,” Lord said. “So it looks like probably the pendulum swinging back that way again. We don’t know that as a fact, but on multiple times the president and the DHS Secretary have hinted that’s where they’re going.” The Department of Homeland Security is Kristi Noem. She said there may be word “as early as summer of this year,” Lord said. “We don’t know. But it’s definitely something emergency management is talking about.”

Lord said that underscores “the importance of us maintaining solid reserves to make sure we can cover those expenses.” 

Local reserves, however, would not have been sufficient to cover the costs of the pier or beach reconstruction, nor would they be if the county were to face similar circumstances in the future. The lack of a federal disaster declaration could have consequences as immediate as the opening and running of local shelters during emergencies, since those operations rely in some part on FEMA reimbursements. If local governments have to make up the cost, the burden will give local officials pause–or shift resources from other commitments. 

If there is a silver lining, it is double-edged. “I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA go away,” the president had said four days into his second term, only to walk back those words in the “Achieving Efficiency” executive order of March 19. The order appears to keep FEMA in place, but it eliminates grant programs and shifts responsibilities to state and local governments. 

Then will come the recommendations of the Agency Review Council. Its 13 members include Kevin Guthrie, who had preceded Lord as Flagler County’s emergency management director and has Florida’s emergency management director under Gov. Ron DeSantis. 

The panel is co-chaired by Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security who today falsely defined habeas corpus as “a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country” (it is an individual’s due process right to challenge detention by government), and Pete Hedseth, the secretary of defense who a few weeks ago telegraphed secret war plans on an unsecure group chat. 

Much of the push against FEMA is based on misinformation, much of it disseminated by the president. For example, the president falsely accused former Vice President and presidential contender Kamala Harris of spending “billions of dollars on housing for illegal migrants,” confusing shelters for migrants for disaster-recovery shelters. Outside of the $42 billion or so it receives, FEMA starting in 2023 has administered about $4 billion in federal grants that go to other agencies, including a $650 million Shelter and Services Program appropriated to the Customs and Border Protection’s budget, and that provides shelter and services for migrants released from Customs’ custody.