For many Vermonters, summer’s return ushers in familiar fears of flooding. This year, that anxiety is complicated by a new concern surrounding federal changes to disaster relief programs that have helped the state in the recent past.
State and local leaders worry about how reductions in staff and funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or the loss of the system altogether, may be felt in Vermont, in the near and long term.
Already, an estimated 20% of permanent staff have left the agency through buyouts or early retirement, and the agency ended a crucial door-knocking program, designed to reach people immediately after a disaster. All of this comes as President Donald Trump and his administration weigh even deeper cuts to the agency.
Still very much in the throes of recovery from the 2023 and 2024 floods, the state, municipalities and individuals have depended on these federal funds to cover the cost of rebuilding. These recent disasters show just how much the state draws from FEMA.
“There’s a fear, too, of what happens if there’s flooding this summer,” said Sarah Henshaw, the coordinator for the Lamoille Area Recovery Network, or LeARN, a group created after the 2023 floods to help individuals navigate disaster recovery.
“What are we going to do, as a community, when there is no FEMA?” she said. “The state has done (its) best to try to build out (its) systems, but the systems are reliant on FEMA.”
The fears surround the state’s capacity to manage short-term response and long-term recovery — things like repairing roads and houses — if more disasters hit the state in the future. Though some residents worry about how the federal shakeup may affect long-term recovery payouts from past disasters, state officials confirmed that those efforts are moving forward without significant changes.
“I think the most accurate way to phrase it right now is that our interaction with FEMA and our progress on obligations and disbursements is functioning or behaving pretty much how it did under the previous administration,” said Doug Farnham, Vermont’s chief recovery officer.
Still, statements by federal officials and actions are fueling anxiety about the future of the agency, even as day-to-day payouts progress.
During a May 20 congressional hearing, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem advocated for shifting the burden of disaster response onto states and away from FEMA, which is housed under her department. Her comments build on a sentiment Trump has advanced since the early days of his term to possibly eliminate FEMA.
Since then, he’s proposed a barrage of cuts to the agency’s budget and workforce, including the end of a $750 million grant program that his earlier administration designed. Also, FEMA administrators said they had no plan to address the projected $8 billion deficit in the agency’s emergency fund during a recent congressional hearing. The cuts leave emergency managers wondering how — and if — FEMA will be able to help communities rebuild after the next big disaster.
Experts also worry about the agency’s capacity for short-term response, given that FEMA has sharply reduced training for those tasked with on-the-ground response, as Reuters reported, and canceled its door-knocking program.
“The whole point of federal assistance is to bring in more humans, to bring in more bodies than the state(s) can provide themselves, especially in small states,” Farnham said. “So we just can’t shift our population, our workforce that much. We need help.”
Federal support on past disasters
Federal aid has been crucial in rebuilding from the 2023 and 2024 floods.
FEMA’s disaster recovery payouts fall into two main categories: individual assistance and municipal assistance. The requests and reimbursements from federal disaster declarations in 2023 and 2024 in each category underscore how much the state, towns and individuals rely on federal support.
For the summer 2023 floods, FEMA dispersed $26.2 million to 3,616 Vermonters — that’s to provide support for things like reconstruction of homes, replacement of private roads or bridges lost, rental assistance, or even for more nuanced “other needs assistance” for things like kidney dialysis machines or space heaters that may have been damaged in a storm.
The maximum amount an individual can receive from FEMA is $42,500, though many individuals saw damage in 2023 and 2024 that exceeded that amount.
The window to file requests for more aid from FEMA related to the 2023 floods has now closed.
“That doesn’t mean work is done. It just means that work (and) resources need to be identified with non-FEMA sources,” said Jason Gosselin, who coordinates the individual assistance program through the state’s Agency of Human Services. He underscored how FEMA is one piece, though a large one, of the multiple sources people draw from to recover — like their insurance, savings accounts and community recovery groups.
The appeals and payouts for last summer’s floods are still moving forward. For the first first major July 2024 flood, FEMA has provided $12.1 million in assistance to 1,686 Vermonters and more than $1.7 million to 225 Vermonters for the later July floods that year. For both 2024 disasters, FEMA has 230 appeals open, as of mid-May, according to the agency’s regional office.
The process for towns and cities to secure reimbursements is not unlike the process individuals take — but at the scale of municipal roads and bridges and multimillion dollar water treatment plants.
“It can be harder to see the role that FEMA plays in supporting cities, towns, states in doing things like cleaning up debris, paying for first responder over time, paying for mass sheltering, even things like helping cover the costs of rebuilding schools and courthouses and other public buildings,” said Sarah Labowitz, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who focuses on disaster recovery data.
Once FEMA obligates the funds, the money goes to the Vermont Department of Emergency Management, which has its own approval process prior to distributing the money to applicants. Applications can get held up at any phase of this process, but collecting the right paperwork is particularly sticky.
“The issue many times is the issue of documentation: Many of these towns have a town administrator that is part time, works very few hours in the week and they may not have any background, or really working knowledge of how roads, culverts, ditches, embankments are constructed,” said Mark Johnson, the recovery section chief for Vermont Emergency Management. It’s part of why the expertise and continuity of FEMA assistance can be so crucial.
For the 2023 disaster, FEMA has awarded more than $190.7 million to the state, to be dispersed across municipal and state projects, according to the agency’s regional office.
Many of those projects are still in the early phases of rebuilding. “They’re still being written or formulated or created in a way that will meet all the guidelines,” Johnson said.
“These are not the low-hanging fruit,” Johnson said of the projects that remain. “In other words, these are the tough ones — these are wastewater treatment facilities, these are things that, for whatever reason, have required more complicated (attention).”
Among those mega projects are the repairs to the wastewater treatment facilities in Johnson, Hardwick and Ludlow.
For the two major July 2024 floods, FEMA has committed around $13 million to the state for municipal recovery.
State officials estimate that the total cost of damage to state and municipal property between 2023 and 2024 will total around $800 million — including the big summer floods and smaller, localized disasters.
“The total changes every day. Until we have final agreement and close out projects, the numbers are going to continue to shift and morph around for several years,” Farnham said. “The things that FEMA hasn’t obligated yet are always going to be subject to change and adjustment.”
Estimates for the total cost of the 2024 floods should stabilize sooner since those damages and repairs are less complicated than those of 2023, according to Farnham.
“We didn’t have the major, major facility damage that we saw in 2023, so we don’t have the big wastewater treatment facility projects. Other than state highways, state (infrastructure) suffered minimal damage,” he said.
One of the biggest unknowns and largest expense from the 2023 flooding is the reconstruction of the state Capitol complex, a collection of state government buildings damaged by the 2023 floods. Instead of fixing each building individually, the state has decided to address the repairs collectively and hopes to finalize its proposal by July 14.
A future without FEMA?
As these state and municipal projects move forward, and as individuals rebuild, the shadow of impending changes to FEMA — and what that might mean for future disasters — hangs heavy.
The state, on its own, does not have the capacity to respond to the scale of future disasters without federal resources. Vermont received an average of $30.9 million in federal disaster funding over the past nine years.
While that number may seem like a small share of the state’s operating budget — a little less than 1%, according to data from the Carnegie Endowment and interpreted by Axios — it is one of the largest proportions in the country. Only six other states (including hurricane-prone Louisiana, Florida and Texas along with post-wildfire Hawaii) have higher shares of federal disaster funding compared with their overall state budget.
“There are all kinds of efficiencies that we gain from having a federal system for disaster recovery,” Labowitz said. “We spread around the risk. We spread around the workforce capacity. We spread around the cost.”
“Does Vermont need to create a standing workforce to respond to disasters? Even though disasters are relatively infrequent, it still needs a workforce to help respond to (disasters) when they do happen. Particularly for smaller states, that’s going to be really hard,” she added.
However, the spate of disasters over the past two years has left Vermont relatively ready to react to extreme floods this summer, Farnham said. The danger, he said, is in the long term, if the state loses the institutional memory of preparedness, response and long-term recovery networks — especially if the federal structure changes.
While boots on the ground workers are essential in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, FEMA’s staff or programs are not to blame for the existing bottle neck that prevents smooth, speedy long-term recovery, Farnham said.
The main barrier to FEMA working quickly is the accumulation of external regulations and environmental precautions that surround massive building projects. “Having fewer federal employees and the same regulations and policies is not going to be helpful,” Farnham said.
Labowitz is watching and waiting for what a summer with a hollowed out FEMA may hold. To her, “It feels like a train that you can see coming from a long way away.”
