The Hill and other outlets recently reported that the Trump administration has released billions in Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds for public assistance and hazard mitigation. The funds had previously been delayed due to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem’s policy requiring a personal review of all expenditures above $100K. 

The catch? DHS is excluding “blue” states — such as California, Illinois, Minnesota, and Colorado — from funding distribution as part of the administration’s pressure campaign to end the partial government shutdown affecting the department.  While that last sentence alone may sound shocking, it is important to know how we got here and how this has all been manufactured. 

The first part involves the amount of money left in FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund, which is not currently affected by the shutdown. Think of the relief fund as a pot of money used whenever a disaster is declared via the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act to fund response and recovery efforts. Administration officials have been claiming the fund could be exhausted in the coming weeks without Congressional action to reopen DHS. How much is in the fund? Public Law 114-4 requires the FEMA administrator to submit a report on the fund on the 5th day of each month. According to the last report, as of the end of January, the fund showed a balance of $10 billion. 

The second part involves a massive aid distribution backlog at FEMA, with the bottleneck being DHS Secretary Noem. According to a press release from Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), $17 billion of that backlog is because of Noem’s policies. According to Murray, during the Biden administration an average of $4.1 billion was released from the Disaster Relief Fund each month. Last year, that amount trickled to an average of just $1.7 billion each month, with the $470 million distributed in July being the lowest amount in the fund’s history. That could be a good thing, right? Maybe the number of disasters has decreased, or July was a particularly slow month for the fund? That’s until you remember that was when destructive flash floods hit central Texas, killing over 130 people, including dozens of children at a summer camp. Also, the acting head of FEMA, David Richardson, stepped down in November over criticism of his handling of the floods. 

So last week, FEMA finally decided to release over $5 billion in funding to clear some of the backlog. To be clear, releasing the money is the right thing to do, but one FEMA spokesperson’s claim that “this is about results, not politics” feels a little disingenuous. The backlog is mostly the administration’s making, and it is clear the assistance was only released to deplete the relief fund further and put more pressure on Democrats. That would sound like a conspiracy theory if it weren’t for the fact that they said the quiet part out loud and excluded states with Democratic governors from the funding.

FEMA’s move reduces the relief fund to around $4-5 billion, which — if the Trump administration had been actively supporting states via FEMA — would deplete the fund in a month or two. However, as Murray pointed out, “any president, at any time, may request supplemental funding from Congress.” Supplemental appropriations have been used in the past to replenish the fund. Trump could just ask Congress to send more money to the relief fund while the details around DHS funding are being hashed out. But this isn’t about the relief fund or FEMA. Trump has stated multiple times that he wants the agency dismantled and for states to bear greater responsibility for disaster recovery. This rapid disbursement of FEMA funds is about the administration’s opposition to reforms at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — the current sticking point behind the partial government shutdown. The disaster relief fund is merely a manufactured crisis to pressure policymakers to act.

The good news is that Congress can replenish the fund anyway. Such a move would require the GOP-led Congress to go against the president, which is not entirely out of the question if Republicans from districts affected by disasters join Democrats. The administration sees the disaster relief fund not as a means to help Americans but rather as a political instrument to achieve its goals. Congress, however, directly represents the people, and it should defend their interests first.