FEMA Warns of Dwindling Disaster Aid Fund

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem
Reuters
By Yuval Rosenberg and Michael Rainey

Happy Friday! On this date 75 years ago, the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. It limits a president to two elected terms in office. Here's your evening update.

FEMA Warns of Dwindling Disaster Aid Fund

As the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security reaches the two-week mark, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Friday that it spent more than $5 billion in disaster relief funds this week, drawing down an account that held $9.6 billion two weeks ago.

A FEMA spokesperson said the funds were released in response to several specific disasters, including some that happened more than a decade ago, and warned that the disaster relief fund "is being rapidly depleted." The spokesperson also accused Democrats of "playing political games" with disaster aid.

As Politico's Thomas Frank and Jennifer Scholtes note, the release of the funds seems to contradict Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's recent statement that FEMA is "scaling back to bare-minimum, life-saving operations only."

CNN's Gabe Cohen reported Thursday that the states receiving portions of the $5 billion in disaster funds do not include several led by Democrats who have clashed with President Trump. More than $14 billion in aid had been held up due to restrictions on disbursements put in place by Noem last year, but as that backlog gets released, some Democratic-led states are being left out, including California, Illinois, Minnesota and Colorado.

FEMA has denied that the delays are politically motivated.

Still, some Democrats in affected states are convinced that the Trump administration is using disaster aid as a political football. Sen. Alex Padilla of California, a state that is still waiting for more than $1 billion in aid related to the wildfires that devastated parts of Los Angeles last year, issued a statement to that effect. "Donald Trump and his Administration continue to play political games while disaster survivors and local governments are forced to wait for desperately needed federal resources," Padilla said.

In a statement Thursday, Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, accused Noem of "disastrous mismanagement of FEMA," adding that "it is absolutely unacceptable that it appears this administration may well be holding up disaster relief to certain blue states."

What's next for the DHS shutdown: The White House sent a new proposal for DHS funding late Thursday, but its contents have not yet been made public. Democratic leaders said they are reviewing the proposal closely.

The message from Republicans, though, did not sound particularly conciliatory. "Democrats need to make a move to end the shutdown before more Americans are harmed by a lack of funding for critical services like disaster relief," a White House official said.

Expectations are low for any progress over the next few days. Noem is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday and the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, and lawmakers will likely focus on the shutdown, even as they remain far apart on finding a way out of it.

Congress Added $34 Billion in 'Backdoor Earmarks' for the Pentagon: Report

Congress approved 1,090 increases for Pentagon procurement and research projects in the fiscal year 2026 defense spending bill. Those increases cost nearly $34 billion - $33,973,694,000, to be more precise - according to a new report by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group. The 2026 total nearly matches those for the previous two years combined, though 2025 was anomalous because the Pentagon was operating under a full-year stopgap spending measure and spending caps enacted in 2023 limited spending increases. The 2026 total is also more than double the $15.5 billion in non-defense earmarks approved by lawmakers in the spending bills passed for the year.

The report says that the jump in 2026 increases "is all the more astounding" given that President Trump's budget request included a 13% increase in Pentagon spending after accounting for an extra budgetary boost provided as part of the Republican "One Big Beautiful Bill Act."

Taxpayers for Common Sense says that, while some of the congressional program increases may serve legitimate national security purposes, they also "often function as backdoor earmarks, allowing lawmakers to anonymously target funds to specific recipients."

The report notes that most of the program increases were proposed anonymously and three-quarters of them provided money for projects that the Pentagon did not seek funding for in its budget request. It also warns of the potential conflicts of interest and political incentives that drive increases in the Pentagon budget without much public oversight or accountability.

"The lack of transparency, public debate, and competitive selection processes for these increases has created a process through which lawmakers can, for all intents and purposes, earmark funds for projects that will likely create jobs in their state or district, benefit companies that contributed to their campaigns, or both, all with virtually no public scrutiny," the report says. "This process in turn fuels wasteful and unnecessary spending that consistently leads to higher topline Pentagon budgets. An analysis of the number and cost of these increases in recent years shows that both are growing at an alarming rate."

The report recommends that lawmakers requesting increases should do so publicly, offer justification for the higher spending and assessments of the long-term costs and certify that they have no financial interest in the increase, among other changes.

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