An Update on FEMA's Disaster Declaration Activity - June 2026

Last week Cameron Hamilton, the President’s nominee for FEMA Administrator, had his confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Barring any unforeseen issue with his FBI and financial background checks, it appears likely that Hamilton will be confirmed as the first permanent Administrator of FEMA under the 2nd Trump Administration. The confirmation hearing was unusual because of the large number of nominees being questioned, and so we didn’t get as robust a hearing as you might expect for such a consequential appointment. Nevertheless Hamilton received a number of pointed questions from Senators on both sides of the aisle about the speed of FEMA decision-making processes and the fairness of decisions about major disaster declarations. Those questions come as FEMA has been accused by Democrats of steering disaster aid towards Republican leaning states.

“The idea that Americans who need help in the wake of a tornado, or a flood or a hurricane should be treated differently based upon politics is shameful. It is un-American.”
- Senator Maggie Hassan, D-NH

You also heard sharp feedback from leaders like Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) about FEMA’s slow and bureacratic response to the St. Louis tornadoes and other disasters in his state (while reaffirming the importance of FEMA and their role).

Hamilton agreed that FEMA was working too slowly, promised that he would be “fair and reasonable” in assessing disaster requests, and agreed that partisanship should have no part to play in the process of making disaster declarations. He also argued that FEMA should “strike a new balance” to achieve cost savings, saying that state and local officials are sometimes incentivized to spend more than is necessary.

“If confirmed, my focus will be to ensure that FEMA is objective, is fair and reasonable, follows the law and is consistent in the approach to be how we adjudicate and process claims and requests for disasters.” - Cameron Hamilton

Earlier this year I wrote extensively about disaster declaration activity, finding that the 2nd Trump Administration was denying many more requests than was typical, was taking longer to make those decisions, and was approving more requests from Republican-voting states than Democratic-voting ones. On that last point, I said that we need to be cautious because of small sample sizes and correlation =/ causation, but the pattern was certainly striking.

It has now been 3 months since Kristi Noem was dismissed as DHS secretary. With Hamilton’s looming appointment, I wanted to check-in and see if things have changed. Like before, I pulled data from OpenFEMA on disaster declaration requests and approval/denials, and divided them by Presidential Administration and, in the case of Trump II, by the periods of DHS leadership. Like before, these are only for disaster declaration requests that have been resolved…OpenFEMA does not include data for requests-in-waiting, and so those are excluded from the dataset.

Prior to the 2nd Trump Administration, disaster denial rates were typically around 15%. The 2nd Trump administration continues to be an outlier, with nearly 30% of requests being denied. This has not changed under Mullin thus far, and in fact has grown (from 28% under Noem to 33%). The numbers under Mullin small and we shouldn’t read too much into this nominal 5% increase, but the trend lines are largely the same.

The length of time it takes to make a disaster declaration decision has also been an outlier under Trump II, taking 47 days for the media ‘approve’ decision (compared to 11 days pre-Trump II) and 120 days to denial (compared to 46). Again, we see the trend continue under Mullin, with the average days to approval at 73 (compared to 37 under Noem) and days to denial at 128 (compared to 110 days).

Lastly, I wanted to include data on the pattern of approvals and denials by state and their partisan lean, as measured by their vote count in the 2024 presidential election. Here are all of those decisions for states, from the beginning of Trump II to the present:

We can see disaster approvals and denials across the political spectrum, though there is clearly a concentration of approval activity in states that voted for President Trump. Whether this is evidence of political favoritism or just the geography of larger events over the past 18 months is an important question, and one that deserves further investigation.

PS - I updated my Presidential Disaster Declaration Dashboard and visualizations to pull live from the FEMA API, to give you up-to-date visualizations on declaration activity including disaster decisions by state and political lean.