States Fear Critical Funding From FEMA May Be Drying Up

[Brenda]

The Federal Emergency Management Agency still has not opened applications for an enormous suite of grants, including ones that many states rely on to pay for basic emergency management operations. Some states pass on much of that money to their most rural, low-income counties to ensure they have an emergency manager on the payroll.

FEMA has blown through the mid-May statutory deadline to start the grants’ application process, according to the National Emergency Management Association, with no word about why or what that might indicate. The delay appears to have little precedent.

But even large metropolitan counties rely on the grants. The hold upin opening the grant applications concerns Robert Wike Graham, deputy director of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Emergency Management, which serves an area of 1.2 million people and is home to a nuclear power plant. The training and preparation FEMA grants help the agency pay for are critical to keeping the community safe in the face of a nuclear catastrophe.

Yet Graham said he has resorted to scouring social media posts and news reports for bits of clues about the grants — and the future of FEMA itself.

“We’re all having to be like, hey, what have you heard? What do you know? What’s going on? Nobody knows,” Graham said.

https://www.propublica.org/article/fema-grants-trump-emergencies