Late last month, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced that it was preparing to slash $1 billion from grants that it gives communities to prepare for disaster, even though the agency’s internal memos acknowledge that this will leave the U.S. more vulnerable to “catastrophic incidents.” The cuts will target everything from transport infrastructure to the much-touted Next Generation Warning System, which used local media to help communities issue alerts to residents in the face of extreme weather events.

In an era of multibillion-dollar climate disasters, Donald Trump’s administration is fixated on both denying the realities of climate change — and hence the need for government agencies to prepare for climate-related disasters — and on eviscerating the roles of key federal government agencies, including FEMA.

In 2023, FEMA’s budget was just shy of $30 billion. This year, it was more than $33 billion. But that increase in overall spending hasn’t protected certain parts of FEMA’s budget from significant cuts, particularly those that are aimed at protecting communities from the worst impacts of disasters. The agency has seen mitigation efforts it coordinates reduced by $25 million; port security grants have lost $40 million; education, training, and exercises have lost $100 million; and federal assistance programs have seen a whopping $700 million hit.

Unless Trump follows through on his stated plans to scrap the entire agency, the overall FEMA budget for next year will again grow to $36 billion if the administration’s current budget proposals are enacted. But FEMA’s fiscal year 2026 budget hides a vast redistribution of funds away from disaster preparation and response, especially around climate change and anti-homelessness efforts.

Showcasing the new priorities, in a truly obscene departure from FEMA’s traditional disaster-relief mission, the agency is offering up more than $600 million to states to help them build immigration jails. And, earlier this year, FEMA froze the distribution of more than $10 billion to help rebuild disaster-hit hospitals, community centers, and other organizations, in an effort to root out any agency or group that might in any way be aiding undocumented immigrants. It has also slow-walked the distribution of funds to help rebuild Los Angeles’s Altadena and Palisades areas following the historic fires, likely worsened by climate change, this past January. Moreover, FEMA has put a hold on dollars already allocated to the Emergency Food and Shelter Program spending, while, according to reporting by the American Prospect, preparing to divert dollars from its Shelter and Services program to reimburse Florida for costs associated with building the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” concentration camp.

The latest cuts to federal grants come on top of a tranche of other reductions in spending on vital climate change-related areas — and in addition to ongoing Trump administration efforts to eliminate the agency. Some of these cuts are to FEMA programs, and involve the elimination of jobs specifically focused on building climate resilience. Others are to NOAA weather stations and climate change monitoring outposts, as well as cuts to the National Weather Service.

Since Trump’s inauguration in January, roughly one-third of FEMA’s staff have either been fired, resigned, or retired, leaving the agency desperately short-handed. At the same time, the federal government is raising the financial damage threshold for when to declare a disaster, and is limiting how much the feds will reimburse victims of these disasters. The Urban Institute has calculated that had these more restrictive criteria been in place between 2008 and 2024, 71 percent of disasters would not have qualified for federal relief, shifting more than $40 billion in disaster-response spending from the federal government onto the backs of already cash-strapped states and local governments.

None of this is accidental. The Trump administration appears to be operating on the assumption that if it just denies the realities of the climate crisis loudly enough, then magically, global warming will not occur. Witness the news that the Environmental Protection Agency is in the process of unraveling its own rules that allow it to regulate, and set limits on, the emissions of CO2, methane and the other gases that contribute to global warming. The result will be massively increased emissions (as much as 7.2 billion additional tons by 2055); an accelerated climate calamity; billions of dollars a year in health expenses related to global warming and dirtier air; and a federal government emergency response system that simply shrugs in the face of disaster.

Of course, not all disasters will be responded to equally. We are getting a glimpse of the desperately uneven and politicized disaster response future in the denial of FEMA assistance to communities in the western part of Maryland after heavy flooding in May. Maryland is Democrat-led (though the most-flooded counties voted for Trump in 2024). By contrast, West Virginia, which is heavily pro-Trump, quickly received assistance following flooding from a similar weather system a few weeks later. And Trump went out of his way to say GOP-dominated Texas would be taken care of following the deadly floods this summer, quickly signing a disaster declaration to allow federal dollars to flow to the state, even while he continued to threaten to deny disaster-response dollars to California because of its opposition to his immigration policies.

Yet in this era of stark cuts, even the reddest of states aren’t guaranteed that the feds will open the financial spigot. Communities in Arkansas, Kentucky, and North Carolina have also had their aid requests nixed in the wake of massive tornado, hurricane, and storm damage, with the feds arguing — in language reminiscent of the anti-welfare arguments long used by conservatives — that if FEMA is seen as being too lax on states, it encourages something of a dependency culture.

State and local officials are warning that they are struggling to hold the line. Agencies with only a handful of staff can’t generate the sort of response that a huge federal agency — with extensive pools of manpower, equipment, and expertise — can draw on. Anyone who has ever bought insurance can understand this concept: A large insurer has the resources to pay out claims allowing homeowners and communities to rebuild after a disaster that those individuals wouldn’t have if simply left to their own devices. Yet, under Trump, FEMA’s role of pooling resources in order to marshal large responses to disaster is being deliberately eviscerated by the ideologues now in charge of the federal government. As a result, many communities — especially those that are smaller and poorer (and, paradoxically, oftentimes more Republican) — will struggle more than would otherwise have been the case to recover from disasters.

Earlier this year, the United Nations reported that in 2024, the world experienced 150 “unprecedented” climate disasters. With the Trump administration turbo-charging fossil fuel production and demolishing both climate research and climate change mitigation efforts in the U.S., these “unprecedented” disasters will become the new norm. Yet, because of the administration’s actions this year, federal emergency response efforts will be curtailed just when they are needed most.