Bureaucrats are increasingly declaring routine weather events like five-inch snowfalls to be “emergencies,” and the federal government gladly pays thanks to guidelines that weren’t adjusted for inflation.
If Federal Emergency Management Agency had taken inflation into account, half of recent “disasters” wouldn’t actually qualify, and taxpayers would have saved $880 million since 2011, according to a new investigation by Tom Coburn, the retiring Oklahoma Republican senator who served as ranking member of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee.
In 1988, Congress made clear that federal aid was for unusual situations where “the disaster is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the state.”
Yet “at one point this year, there were 33 states with active disaster zones across the United States,” Coburn’s office wrote.
Even despite the inflation issues, half of storms were only determined to be disasters because states “exaggerate” damage in their early assessments to the feds — something they have a strong incentive to do.
The District of Columbia “overestimated its damage one hundred percent of the time,” with the result being more federal funding — even though it has a $1.75 billion rainy day fund.
FEMA determines whether something is a disaster by using a formula for per-capita damage, which must be a little over a dollar per person.
But since storms are often only in one area and the damage is divided by the population of the whole state, the results are wildly dependent on the population of the state, with more populous states unlikely to be able to foist damage costs onto the feds.
FEMA has resisted suggestions that it tighten the program on its own, Coburn wrote.
“A new system for declaring disaster should be consistent with Congressional intent to only provide federal disaster aid when state and local communities have actually been overwhelmed and when lives or property are really at stake, and federal relief is truly needed. It should also curb states’ increasing dependence on federal disaster funding and the current incentive to exaggerate disaster aid, such as by increasing states’ cost share to qualify for aid or by strengthening FEMA’s process for assessing damage and tracking expenditures,” he wrote.
