A year after floods swept through the Texas Hill Country, killing 139 people and upending survivors’ lives, a new report shows more than half of families who applied for federal disaster aid never got it.
Released by watchdog group Sabotaging Our Safety (SOS), the analysis blames the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s faltering response on the Trump White House’s moves to gut the agency.
FEMA’s failure in the wake of the Guadalupe River floods also offers a warning about how unprepared the feds are to deal with future disasters, according to officials with SOS, a national coalition that includes lawmakers, advocates and former federal officials.
“If you are waiting two months after a disaster to even get help with basic needs or enough repair money to make your house safe to live in again, that’s a real burden,” Maddie Sloan, director of disaster recovery and fair housing for public interest group Texas Appleseed, told the Current of SOS’s findings.
“It’s particularly hard not just on families and individual survivors but also local jurisdictions, who are spending money to do emergency response … and don’t know whether or not they will ever be reimbursed.”
Among the findings in the report:
- Only 3,877 of the 8,631 families who applied for FEMA aid in the 10 counties with federal disaster declarations were deemed eligible. That 45% eligibility rate is roughly half of the 80% approval rate when Hurricane Beryl slammed into Texas during the summer of 2024.
- As of this May, FEMA had approved just $41 million in total individual assistance across the 10 affected counties — a fraction of a percent of the damage and economic loss estimated at as much as $22 billion.
- A majority of applications from Texas flood victims were never evaluated by FEMA officials, meaning families who sought funding never received a decision about whether they were even deemed eligible.
While FEMA money is intended to be a life preserver for those caught up in a disaster, not a fund to fully rebuild, advocates said the report shows the agency failed to even deliver on that part of its mission.
The consequences have been dire for residents who had little other source of financial help after the Guadalupe River surged nearly 30 feet in 45 minutes, changing lives forever, SOS officials said.
‘The delay absolutely cost lives’
The report found 97% of Kerr County residents had no flood insurance and 84% had no homeowners insurance. Roughly 63% of households there earn less than $60,000 annually.
“When I hear those numbers, I don’t see a spreadsheet, I see my neighbors,” said Ashlee Willis, whose family lost their farm and small business on the banks of Sandy Creek. “I am so tired of this recovery moving at the speed of bureaucracy instead of the speed of a crisis.”
To Willis’ point, the SOS report accuses FEMA of making things worse through its mismanagement and sluggish response in the hours after the flood.
David Richardson, the agency’s acting administrator, was unreachable for nearly 24 hours on the day of the disaster, which delayed the start of search-and-rescue operations, the report states.
Meanwhile, FEMA’s disaster call centers went dark in the days following because the Department of Homeland Security allowed call center funding to lapse.
Beyond that, former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s policy demanding that she personally sign off on all contracts exceeding $100,000 further contributed to the delay. Noem, who was fired from her role in March, didn’t authorize search-and-rescue efforts until three days after the flooding began.
“That delay absolutely cost lives,” Willis said. “There were no boots on the ground. There was nobody knocking on doors.”
Unable to fill the gap
Trump administration officials have publicly depicted FEMA as bloated and bureaucratic and said they want to shift more responsibility for disaster recovery to state and local officials.
However, Texas Appleseed’s Sloan cautioned that cash-strapped states and municipalities aren’t equipped to handle the immediate response to massive natural disasters. That proposed shift also comes as experts warn the climate crisis is making such catastrophes more severe and more frequent.
While eight flood sirens were installed and tested in Kerr County this May, they were funded by the state, not the federal government. And the second installation phase won’t take place until 2027.
What’s more, the county’s flood maps are still outdated, and the most recent FEMA flood map was last revised in 2011.
Meanwhile, flood victim Willis is begging local officials to rebuild a road leading to her property that washed out in another river rise two weeks ago, leaving her farm inaccessible to potential customers as the family struggles to rebuild.
If the Trump administration continues to bleed out FEMA, states can’t come up with the billions of dollars in recovery funding needed to replace it, Sloan said.
“There is a reason we have a federal recovery system: because it’s inefficient to have 50 separate FEMAs,” Sloan said. “In many aspects, FEMA is a way in which Americans show up for each other during a disaster, in that we spread risk and we ensure that hopefully everyone gets taken care of — that you’re not left on your own just because of which state you happen to live in.”
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