Disaster Assistance and the Uneven Geography of Response Capacity: Lessons from GAO’s High-Risk Series

This post summarizes Disaster Assistance High-Risk Series: State and Local Response Capabilities (GAO-26-108599, Dec. 18, 2025) issued by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) under the leadership of Chris Currie, with the named GAO staff team acknowledged in the report. The report’s central finding is straightforward but consequential: while disaster response in the United States is designed to be locally executed and state-supported, state and local governments remain structurally dependent on federal capacity—especially FEMA’s convening power, funding, and surge coordination—yet their underlying capabilities vary substantially across jurisdictions.

GAO first situates this dependence in the scale and diversity of federal support. FEMA preparedness grants are a foundational input to state and local readiness, and GAO reports that FEMA awarded almost $15 billion across three major preparedness grant programs from FY2014–FY2024, including approximately $4.035B (EMPG), $4.438B (State Homeland Security Program), and $6.494B (Urban Area Security Initiative). Those dollars do not simply fund equipment; they also underwrite human capital and institutional continuity. GAO notes examples in which states funded significant portions of their emergency-management workforces through FEMA grant support, underscoring how preparedness often rests on recurrent federal funding rather than purely state or local fiscal capacity. In parallel, FEMA’s training and technical assistance functions serve as a national standard-setter; officials described FEMA training as both a professionalizing mechanism and a practical coordination asset because relationships built “in blue skies” reduce friction during response.

The federal footprint expands sharply during catastrophic events. GAO highlights that FEMA reported obligating over $16.6 billion for Hurricanes Helene and Milton and the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires in FY2025 alone, signaling that response and early recovery costs can rapidly exceed what most states can absorb without federal financing and logistics. Operationally, GAO emphasizes the mission assignment mechanism as a key tool by which FEMA directs and reimburses other federal agencies for response tasks—an approach that can mobilize specialized capabilities at scale. During these recent disasters, federal agencies provided assistance through about 1,300 mission assignments as of August 1, 2025; Helene alone accounted for 1,017. The report offers a concrete illustration of why FEMA’s coordinating role matters: technical issues with public alerting during the Los Angeles wildfires required FEMA, as the federal touchpoint, to engage the FCC and cellular providers—an intervention state officials said would have been harder to execute without FEMA’s position in the federal interagency ecosystem.

Against that backdrop, GAO’s most analytically important contribution is its documentation of wide variation in response capability as states self-assess against targets they set under the national preparedness system. Across the states GAO reviewed, the share of response targets that states reported they could meet ranged from 12% to 90%, and all states in the sample fell short on at least one target. This variation is not merely interstate; officials also described pronounced within-state differences, particularly for smaller or rural jurisdictions where emergency management offices may have minimal staffing and constrained tax bases. The implication is that “state capacity” is an uneven aggregate, with pockets of fragility that may become decisive during fast-moving incidents.

Finally, GAO links these empirical patterns to an active reform environment. The report notes executive actions in 2025 establishing a FEMA Review Council and directing review of policies and metrics for federal responsibility, and it frames four practical considerations if responsibilities are shifted toward states: clear communication and guidance, adequate time to prepare, recognition that catastrophic or multi-state events will still require federal support, and preservation of FEMA’s federal coordination role. GAO’s analysis suggests that any serious reallocation of roles must confront a hard constraint: even well-resourced states may depend on federal assets when disasters are sufficiently large, geographically correlated, or technically complex.

Disclaimer: Information only, based on the cited GAO report; not legal advice and not an official interpretation of any agency policy.