Disaster Aid Has Become a Political Lottery — and the Numbers Prove It

President Donald Trump approved nearly 90% of major disaster requests from all-Republican states in his second term — and only 23% from all-Democratic ones. That gap comes from a study of roughly 2,500 disaster declarations since FEMA's creation in 1979, and it frames a quiet but costly shift in who pays for America's disasters.

The shift has a human toll. Four tornadoes tore across southwest Michigan in early March 2026, killing four people — the state's deadliest natural hazards in decades. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to cover uninsured and underinsured losses. FEMA said no. She appealed. FEMA said no again.

How uneven have the denials become?

The Trump administration denied 26% of major disaster declarations in 2025, according to a Brennan Center analysis — more than double the prior year's rate and well above the 15% denial average of the past two decades. The denials have not fallen evenly, and the pattern is stark when measured by party control.

• Trump approved nearly 90% of requests from states where the governor and both U.S. senators were Republican, versus 23% from all-Democratic states, per a study of ~2,500 declarations since 1979.
• Colorado, an all-Democratic state, had both of its 2025 disaster appeals rejected — the state's first denials since the 1980s.
• Florida, an all-Republican state, fared differently: in June, Trump announced $416 million for the state's disasters without specifying which one, noting much of it would go to the Panhandle, "one of his favorite places." A January 2025 snowstorm there was linked to 13 deaths and roughly $200 million in damages.
• Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, analyzed FEMA data and found about 84% of requests from states Trump won in 2024 were approved, versus about 42% from states he lost.

The White House has denied that politics plays a role in who receives aid.

What does this mean for local budgets?

The money math is brutal. FEMA owes local governments almost $10 billion in reimbursements for recovery work that cities and towns have already paid for, according to NPR. When a declaration is denied, towns can be left covering costs as high as 15% of their annual budget, per the Brennan Center. Philanthropies and aid groups such as Team Rubicon are expanding their roles to fill the gaps.

That burden is now shifting onto neighbors and the places they gather, argues Daniel P. Aldrich, Dean's Professor of Resilience at Northeastern University, who studies disaster recovery and has written six books on the topic. Nonprofits and community organizations cannot replace federal funding, Aldrich writes, but they can build cooperation, trust and collective action — assets that better prepare neighborhoods and speed recovery.

What happened when the feds never came?

Union City, Michigan, offers the test case. An EF3 tornado killed three people there in March 2026, and help arrived within hours — not from Washington, but from neighbors.

School administrators turned the local high school into a shelter the night of the storm. Volunteers showed up with food and supplies. The local United Way opened a relief fund. Donations poured into the high school, and the superintendent said staff worked out how to get supplies to the people who needed them. A local church damaged in the storm started a fund to help residents pay their insurance deductibles.

Local residents are almost always the first responders after disasters strike. What was different this time is that federal help never followed.

Do social ties actually save lives?

The evidence says yes, and it's quantified. After Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, floodwaters as high as 12 feet covered the low-income neighborhood around the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church in east New Orleans. By summer 2007, about 90% of its residents had returned home. For New Orleans as a whole, the figure hit only 45%. The difference, researchers suggest, was the leadership of the Rev. Vien Nguyen, who coordinated supplies, organized volunteers and kept scattered residents in touch even as they evacuated to other states.

Aldrich's lab found a similar pattern during COVID-19. Comparing demographically similar U.S. counties, and after accounting for politics, governance, healthcare quality and demographics, the study found two kinds of ties reduced the pandemic's toll: bonding ties connecting neighbors and family, and linking ties connecting residents to officials — often built through libraries and faith-based organizations.

Libraries are already doing this work. In 2025, 44.7% of U.S. public libraries served as cooling or warming centers during extreme temperatures, up 8.2% from 2022. Yet the preparedness gap is wide: in a national survey, 84% of library directors agreed libraries have a critical role in disaster response, but only 36% knew that federal law allows libraries to seek FEMA relocation funding to move to safer ground, and just 51% had an emergency preparedness plan.

Where does the money actually go?

Aldrich's forthcoming book, "Beyond Common Ground," documents the imbalance: more than 90% of federal disaster funds in the early 21st century went to roads, utilities and other standard infrastructure, and less than 10% went to libraries, parks, schools, places of worship and community centers — the places where neighbors check on one another and organize recovery. Federal aid may rebuild some of these spaces, but it rarely pays to keep them open and running when communities need them most.

There's a mortality figure attached, too. In a separate study, Aldrich found Japanese communities with a higher density of social infrastructure had half the number of deaths from the catastrophic March 2011 tsunami compared to similar communities with fewer gathering spaces.

As federal aid becomes less predictable, the communities that recover best from the next disaster may be the ones that kept their libraries open, their civic halls full of volunteers and their parks full of residents.