Less than 72 hours after the rivers crested in central Vermont on July 11, 2023, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had established a mobile command center in a parking lot on the outskirts of downtown Montpelier.
Hundreds of FEMA canvassers, dressed in shiny blue traffic vests, would spend the following weeks knocking on thousands of doors in Washington County and beyond. They were jumpstarting the application process for a program that would end up disbursing about $26 million to more than 3,000 households who suffered damage during that summer’s catastrophic flooding.
There’s a lot that state officials don’t know about what FEMA’s response will look like when the next disaster hits. But Douglas Farnham, Vermont’s chief flood recovery officer, said residents will not see a repeat of the massive canvassing operation that helped connect Vermonters with the assistance they needed.
“From what we’ve seen in other states that have had declarations this year, we really shouldn’t count on that same door knocking, all-hands-on-deck approach that we were lucky enough to have in 2023 and 2024.”
A memorandum issued by FEMA in May directed agency officials to “discontinue … door-to-door canvassing” in favor of a more “targeted” approach. The memo also announced the end of “disaster recovery centers” — the brick-and-mortar locations where Vermonters, in 2023 and again in 2024, could seek in-person assistance with complex applications.
President Donald Trump has said he wants to “abolish” FEMA. He’s said he wants to “reform” FEMA. Most recently, he said he wants to “wean off of FEMA, and … bring it down to the state level.”
State and national experts say only one thing is clear as of now: The new federal administration wants states to assume a bigger role in disaster response and recovery. The ambiguity over what that looks like, according to Eric Forand, director of Vermont Emergency Management, has complicated the business of disaster preparedness for state officials trying to gird for the next catastrophe.
“We don’t know what FEMA is going to do, because they don’t really know at this point. I think the federal government might be kind of running the ship more than they are,” Forand told Vermont Public. “It’s a weird situation that we’re in — we can’t come up with a solution because we don’t know the problem yet.”
A literal rainy day fund
Vermont, which has experienced 25 federal disaster declarations since 2011, has been particularly reliant on federal aid. According to a recent analysis, the state has received more federal disaster assistance per capita over the past 15 years than any states but Louisiana, Hawaii and New York.
“So we rely heavily on FEMA for us to help rebuild after a disaster,” said State Treasurer Mike Pieciak. “There has been a target on FEMA for quite some time, and for us, because of how impactful it would be on Vermont, we have to pay attention.”
For flood damage from the last two summers alone, Vermont is expected to eventually receive more than $700 million in public assistance to repair state and municipal infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, culverts and public buildings. Households, meanwhile, have received about $43 million in individual assistance for damage to heating systems and electric panels, as well as destroyed appliances and damaged homes.
Pieciak convened a special task force earlier this year to evaluate the fiscal impacts of policy changes undertaken by the Trump administration. Those evaluations included an examination of two administration proposals related to FEMA: One would increase the damage threshold needed to qualify for a declared disaster; the other would cap federal reimbursement for damage to public infrastructure at 75%.
I do think it means putting aside money and having it for a rainy day in the future, literally a rainy day in the future, when there’s flooding and devastation in Vermont.Mike Pieciak, Vermont state treasurer
Applied retrospectively, Pieciak said, Vermont would have lost out on as much as $65 million in federal aid over the last 15 years as a result of those changes. In a forthcoming report, the task force will be encouraging elected officials to establish a new state-funded reserve for recovery costs that may no longer be covered by the federal government.
“I think the bottom line is we have to be proactive in this space,” Pieciak said. “I do think it means putting aside money and having it for a rainy day in the future, literally a rainy day in the future, when there’s flooding and devastation in Vermont.”
In the meantime, Pieciak said, flood-prone municipalities should consider building their own financial reserves.
Small towns, big fears
In places such as Barton, which suffered extensive flood damage to roads, bridges, culverts and private residences in the summers of 2023 and 2024, a special flood recovery fund isn’t an option right now.
“These disasters are wiping out more than the total of my annual budget each time,” said Barton Town Clerk Kristin Atwood. “And there is just no way these people who are paying taxes to raise that money can afford to do that.”
Atwood said she’s already begun to experience a shift in how FEMA operates. Securing approval for federal reimbursement for the $1 million or so in damage from the 2023 flooding, Atwood said, “went pretty well.” The 2024 application process, meanwhile, “has gone much slower.”
“And that trend isn’t a positive one obviously and leaves me feeling very shaken, because any resources we had to handle this on our own are very clearly gone.”
Atwood isn’t sure why things are taking so much longer for FEMA to process. She said her biggest fear now is that the federal agency won’t be there at all the next time her town gets flooded.
“I guess I’m more worried that they’re going to change the standards for who gets FEMA,” she said. “I worry they’re going to raise them so high that we’re never going to meet that bar.”
It’s a prospect that towns across Vermont are wrestling with. Liz Scharf serves on the select board in Middlesex, which saw about $10 million in flood damage over the past two summers.
“I’m really thinking about the future of our town, and what happens when the next storm comes and we don’t qualify for a federal disaster,” Scharf told state leaders at a flood anniversary event in Barre. “My biggest concern is we’re not going to qualify for federal disasters because of a new calculation that the federal government is going to put in that makes it harder to get a federally declared disaster.”
Throwing out the playbook
That’s not an unreasonable concern, according to Wyoming Homeland Security Director Lynn Budd, who serves as president of the National Emergency Management Association.
“The messaging that I’m giving to my governor’s office and our legislature is just don’t count on getting a disaster (declaration),” she said. “This is not funding that’s going to be coming.”
Budd said she’s advising colleagues in other states to devise management plans that assume states, not FEMA, will now be on the hook for the long-term recovery operations. She said she’s struggling to take her own advice.
“We’re planners. We like to gather as many facts as we can and figure out what’s going to happen, and how can we plan for that,” Budd said. “If we’re missing a whole bunch of facts, that makes it even harder to prepare for that natural event that might be coming because we don’t have all the information.”
Erica Bornemann served as director of Vermont Emergency Management from 2017 to 2023 and now works as a consultant. She’s done work in states that have experienced federally declared disasters since Trump took office. FEMA’s response, she said, “has wildly varied from state to state.”
“There isn’t a playbook, or at least it feels like the playbook has been thrown out, so every single disaster is being handled differently,” she said. “I think what we would expect to see in Vermont is a pretty short-term response, and potentially a lot of surprises that are different from past responses from FEMA.”
Fewer tools in the toolbox
FEMA has already taken steps to scale back the funding it sends to states for disaster preparation. Earlier this year, it cancelled two key hazard mitigation funding programs, which, state officials say, means Vermont will lose out on millions of dollars.
I think every single state, including Vermont, really has to have a very frank conversation … about what the actual impact of, say, zero federal funding by 2026 looks like on Vermont’s preparedness.Erica Bornemann, disaster consultant and former director of Vermont Emergency Management
Without those programs, Bornemann said disaster preparedness will become an even taller task for states such as Vermont.
“So two very important tools in the toolbox to reduce our risk at the community level are seeming to go away,” Bornemann said. “And that’s a problem, because the only way we break the cycle of disaster is to be able to implement mitigation projects that are strategic, in a way that lowers risks in communities.”
The most pressing fiscal cliff may be the lack of FEMA funding for the state agencies responsible for doing the emergency planning. Applications for the federal emergency preparedness grants — they constitute about 75% of the annual budget at Vermont Emergency Management — were supposed to go live in early spring. The feds still haven’t opened up applications for the grants. And VEM director Eric Forand said he doesn’t know when, or if, the funding will become available.
“There’s really been no specific information about why it’s being held up,” Forand said. “We’ve heard rumors that it could be going away.”
Bornemann said she’s heard the same.
“I think every single state, including Vermont, really has to have a very frank conversation … about what the actual impact of, say, zero federal funding by 2026 looks like on Vermont’s preparedness, and our ability to recover from disasters that are happening every single year,” she said.
Shift to the states
Vermont Public asked FEMA for an interview to discuss what sorts of changes states can expect in the future, and how they might affect recovery and resiliency in places such as Vermont.
In a written statement, an agency spokesperson said FEMA “is shifting from bloated, D.C.-centric deadweight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens.”
“FEMA’s principles for emergency management assert that disasters are best managed when they’re federally supported, state managed and locally executed,” the spokesperson wrote.
State officials generally agree that FEMA is a bloated bureaucracy. And Douglas Farnham said there’s enormous opportunity in reimagining the way FEMA operates.
“It could be approached in a way that could be a net gain for both the states and the feds,” he said.
U.S. Sen. Peter Welch has introduced legislation that embraces FEMA’s stated vision — the bill would shift the responsibility for deploying federal disaster aid from federal bureaucracies to state-level entities, such as regional planning commissions.
“What is clear to me is there has to be much more, basically, local control and local decision making about how to proceed,” Welch told a crowd gathered in Barre earlier this week. “You’ve got to have the folks who are going to have to live with the decisions be in a position to make the decisions, and you’ve got to have the folks who are closest to the problem empowered to solve the problem.”
Welch, however, said he’s not convinced that the Trump administration will provide the funding states need to execute that new responsibility.
