America Is Lying to Itself About the Cost of Disasters

The United States is trapped in a cycle of disasters bigger than the ones our systems were built for. Before Hurricane Helene made landfall late last month, FEMA was already running short on funds; now, Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security secretary, told reporters on Wednesday, if another hurricane hits, it will run out altogether. At the same time, the Biden administration has announced that local expenses to fix hurricane damage in several of the worst-affected states will be completely reimbursed by the federal government.

This mismatch, between catastrophes the government has budgeted for and the actual toll of overlapping or supersize disasters, keeps happening—after Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Maria, Hurricane Florence. Almost every year now, FEMA is hitting the same limits, Carlos Martín, who studies disaster mitigation and recovery for the Brookings Institution, told me. Disaster budgets are calculated to past events, but “that’s just not going to be adequate” as events grow more frequent and intense. Over time, the U.S. has been spending more and more money on disasters in an ad hoc way, outside its main disaster budget, according to Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia Climate School.

Each time, the country manages to scrape by, finding more money to help people who need it. (And FEMA does have money for immediate Helene response.) But each time, when funds get too low, the agency winds up putting its other relief work on hold in favor of lifesaving measures, which can slow down recovery and leave places more vulnerable when the next storm hits. In theory, the U.S. could keep doing that, even as costs keep growing, until at some point, these fixes become either unsustainable or so normalized as to be de facto policy. But it’s a punishing cycle that leaves communities scrambling to react to ever more dramatic events, instead of getting ahead of them.

The U.S. is facing a growing number of billion-dollar disasters, fueled both by climate change and by increased development in high-risk places. This one could cost up to $34 billion, Moody’s Analytics estimated. Plus, the country is simply declaring more disasters over time in part because of “shifting political expectations surrounding the federal role in relief and recovery,” according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution.

Meanwhile, costs of these disasters are likely to balloon further because of gaps in insurance. In places such as California, Louisiana, and Florida, insurers are pulling out or raising premiums so high that people can’t afford them, because their business model cannot support the current risks posed by more frequent or intense disasters. So states and the federal government are already taking on greater risks as insurers of last resort. The National Flood Insurance Program, for instance, writes more than 95 percent of the residential flood policies in the United States, according to an estimate from the University of Pennsylvania. But the people who hold those policies are almost all along the coasts, in specially designated flood zones. Inland flooding such as Helene brought doesn’t necessarily conform to those hazard maps; less than 1 percent of the homeowners in Buncombe County, North Carolina, where the city of Asheville was badly hit, had flood insurance.

For Helene-affected areas, after the immediate lifesaving operations are done, this is the question that most haunts Craig Fugate, the FEMA administrator under President Barack Obama: “How do you rebuild or provide housing for all those folks?” The Stafford Act, the legislation that governs U.S. disaster response, was written with the idea that most people will use insurance to cover their losses and was not built for this current reality of mass damage to essentially uninsured homes, he told me. “The insurance model is no longer working, and the FEMA programs are not designed to fill those gaps,” Fugate said.

Fugate would like to see major investments in preparing homes and infrastructure to withstand disasters more gracefully. This is a common refrain among the people who look most closely at these problems: Earlier this week, another former FEMA administrator, Brock Long, told my colleague David A. Graham that the country should be rewarding communities for smarter land-use planning, implementing new building codes, and working with insurance companies “to properly insure their infrastructure.” They keep hitting this note for good reason. A study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that every dollar of disaster preparedness saves communities $13 in damages, cleanup costs, and economic impacts. But since 2018, the government has set aside just 6 percent of the total of its post-disaster grant spending to go toward pre-disaster mitigation.

That actually counts as a major increase in federal funding for resilience, Fugate told me, but it’s still nothing compared with the trillions of dollars needed to protect infrastructure from current risk. Disaster costs are only going to keep growing unless the country invests in rebuilding its infrastructure for the future. Martín put it to me like this: “If I were to have a heart attack, heaven forbid, and I survived it, I would say, Okay, I’m going to start eating better. I’m going to start exercising. I’m going to do all the things to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” The country keeps sustaining shocks to its system that won’t stop without work.

But some of these measures, such as adopting stronger building codes, tend to be unpopular with the states that hold the authority to change them. “There is a sort of quiet tension between states and the federal government in terms of how to do this,” Schlegelmilch said. The way things work right now, states and local governments would likely end up shouldering more of the cost of preparing for disasters. But they know the federal government will help fund recovery.

Plus, spending money on disaster recovery helps win elected officials votes in the next election. “The amount of funding you bring in has a very strong correlation to votes—how many you get, how many you lose,” Schlegelmilch said. But the same cannot be said for preparedness, which has virtually no correlation with votes. Nonprofits working on disasters face a similar problem. Schlegelmilch told me that some have websites that they keep dark, and then fill in “like a Mad Libs” when disasters inevitably hit. “Insert the disaster name here, insert a photo here, and then they’re up and ready to go, in terms of fundraising, because that’s when people give.” That is natural enough: People want to help people who are obviously in distress. It’s more abstract to imagine helping before any danger arrives, even if that would be more effective.

None of these dynamics are going away, and Schlegelmilch thinks changing them could mean rethinking federal emergency management altogether, “the way we reimagined homeland security after 9/11,” he said. He counts as many as 90 disaster-assistance programs across as many as 20 different agencies; a reorganization into a central disaster department would at least streamline these. “I say this knowing full well that the creation of the Department of Homeland Security was a mess,” he told me. But, he added, “We have to get ahead of this with a greater investment in preparedness and resilience. And greater efficiency and coordination.”

Fugate’s expectations are more pragmatic. “Have you ever seen a committee chairman in Congress willingly give up their program areas?” he asked. (Notably, even after DHS was created, its first secretary, Tom Ridge, had to navigate 88 congressional committees and subcommittees that took an interest in the department’s work.) He would like to see the U.S. establish a National Disaster Safety Board, similar to the National Transportation Safety Board—an organization funded by Congress, and separate from any executive agency—that would assess storm responses and make recommendations.

But he isn’t sure the country has gone through enough yet to fundamentally change this cycle of expensive, painful recoveries. “Every time I think there’s some event where you go, Okay, we’re going to come to our senses, we seem to cope enough that we never get to that tipping point,” he said. Some catastrophic failures—Hurricane Katrina, for example—have changed disaster policy. But Americans have yet to change our collective mind about preparing for disaster adequately. People still can’t even agree about climate change, Fugate notes. “I mean, you keep thinking we’re going to get one of these storms, that we’re going to hit the tipping point and everybody’s going to go, Yeah, we got a problem.” So far, at least, we haven’t reached it yet.