Americans who survived tornados, floods, and wildfires are still waiting on $10 billion in aid from the Trump administration over a year later.
A Guardian analysis finds that FEMA has not doled out long-term recovery funds to survivors of the 2025 tornado in St Louis, the central Texas floods, or the wildfires in Los Angeles. These natural disasters crippled infrastructure, destroyed homes, and displaced thousands.
“To find out that your own country can’t even do what it has historically done for other survivors of disasters, that’s very disheartening, and it’s also what kind of galvanized me to get involved,” Los Angeles resident Sylvie Andrews, who lost her Altadena home in the wildfires, told The Guardian. “There are people in Congress who are resistant to the idea of pre-funding anything when they’re not sure there’s going to be a disaster, and the reality is there will be more disasters every year because of climate change.… I guarantee there will be communities that need it.”
“The insurance didn’t cover much of anything. And the Fema just kind of backed you up for a little while, but didn’t get you back on track,” said Demetrice Davis, who lost his home in a St. Louis tornado. “The government agencies are not really doing what they’re supposed to do. “It’s just a matter of asking, as a taxpaying citizen, what are we paying for? ... As a taxpaying citizen, we are putting in the pot. We are supposed to get some type of return. But it seems like that’s not happening. And there seems to be a lot of excuses and passing the buck because most of the lawmakers we talked to blamed it on other lawmakers.”
Both Davis and Andrews traveled to Washington, D.C., last month with Rebuild: the National Disaster Survivors Association to lobby lawmakers to reactivate the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program, or CDBG-DR, which is supposed to allocate funds to rebuilding homes and infrastructure after natural disasters.
“Let’s be clear: this is funding FEMA had already approved and that we have been demanding the agency release for weeks,” California Democratic Representative Judy Chu said last month. “And while today is progress, President Trump still has not delivered the long-term federal disaster recovery funding Los Angeles communities need to rebuild.”
This is not the first instance in which Americans caught in natural disasters have been hung out to dry by the Trump administration. Last year, President Trump denied disaster aid requests from multiple blue states while awarding it to red ones. He did it once again over the summer, putting millions of Americans at risk in the process.