FEMA Individual Assistance Grants for Disaster Survivors: Summary of Data and Analysis

Some Members of Congress express interest in knowing how much financial assistance the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) provides to disaster survivors through the Individual Assistance (IA) program following a presidential declaration of emergency or major disaster under the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (Stafford Act; P.L. 93-288, as amended; codified at 42 U.S.C. §§5121 et seq.), as well as the considerations that may affect such award outcomes. When IA is authorized pursuant to a Stafford Act declaration, FEMA may provide grants of financial assistance directly to eligible disaster survivors to support their disaster recovery through the Individuals and Households Program (IHP). IHP assistance may include financial assistance for housing, as well as other needs. (There are also other federal programs that may provide additional financial assistance to disaster survivors.) FEMA makes substantial amounts of data publicly available through its OpenFEMA Data Sets, including several that provide detailed information on the specific types and amounts of IHP assistance provided to specific disaster survivors. A challenge, however, is that many of the available datasets—including the dataset CRS used for this report, “Individuals and Households Program—Valid Registrations—v1”—are large files with more records than can be opened and explored using traditionally available tools, such as Microsoft Excel. Thus, this report is intended to provide, and make more accessible, data that address common congressional questions through an exploration of FEMA’s publicly available IA-IHP data. Further, CRS’s exploratory data analysis is accompanied by comprehensive comparative data visualizations, including maps, figures, and tables based on and summarizing such FEMA data. The focus of this report is on average IHP award amounts provided to eligible disaster survivors (IHP recipients), generally, at the state level, and based on IHP recipient characteristics (i.e., homeowner and renter status; insurance coverage; gross household income; and household size). The data presented represent a snapshot in time. This report considers data from emergencies and major disasters declared on or after October 15, 2002, through March 21, 2024. This period begins with FEMA’s regulatory changes implementing statutory changes to the IHP following the enactment of the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 (DMA2K, P.L. 106-390). It ends immediately before the effective date of FEMA’s most recent regulatory changes amending its implementation of the IHP. CRS also compared IHP data prior to and following the enactment of the Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018 (DRRA, Division D of P.L. 115-254), which amended the Stafford Act, creating the potential for disaster survivors to receive more than double the financial assistance they may previously have been eligible to receive. For details on the data analysis, see the “Methodology” section. There are a number of factors and considerations that may have a role in the outcomes revealed through this data exploration. While potential associations may be made between aspects of IHP program implementation and financial assistance awards (e.g., one may anticipate a statutory change could be responsible for a certain change in the data trends), additional research would be needed to establish causation. CRS has not concluded that any single piece of legislation, regulation, or agency policy is responsible for any pattern of results, as additional factors may also affect program outcomes (such as the increasing frequency and severity of disasters, the type of incident and resulting damages, community and individual investments in hazard mitigation, and disaster survivors’ personal circumstances.) During the entire period of consideration (October 15, 2002, through March 21, 2024), FEMA provided approximately $33.2 billion in financial assistance to disaster survivors through the IHP. CRS found that, throughout this period, Stafford Act declared incidents for which IHP assistance was provided were generally concentrated in Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, and Mississippi (FEMA Region 4); Louisiana and Texas (FEMA Region 6); and California (FEMA Region 9). These states generally also had the most IHP recipients (i.e., the total count of IHP recipients for all incidents in the period considered)—along with New York and Puerto Rico (FEMA Region 2); and Illinois and Michigan (FEMA Region 5). Most of the states with the most declared disasters are concentrated along the Gulf Coast of the United States, where hurricanes were the most commonly declared disaster. Hurricanes declared in Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and Puerto Rico created the largest proportion of IHP recipients, and such disaster survivors collectively received approximately $19.5 billion (58.6%) of the total IHP funding provided during the entire period of consideration (this funding is inclusive of all the incidents declared in these states—not only hurricanes). During a shorter, more recent period of consideration (i.e., the period after the implementation of the DRRA, from August 1, 2017, to March 21, 2024), disaster survivors from Florida, Louisiana, and Puerto Rico comprised 66.5% of all IHP recipients in the post-DRRA period. This group, however, received the lowest average IHP award amounts (less than $2,500). These averages contributed to a decrease in the overall national average IHP award amount in this period, compared with the longer period of consideration (i.e., the pre-DRRA period from October 15, 2002, to July 31, 2017). This decrease occurred despite other states’ average IHP award amounts increasing between August 1, 2017, and March 21, 2024, after implementation of DRRA. Reasons an IHP recipient may receive a certain award amount may include the IHP recipient’s personal circumstances, as well as factors such as the incident type and resulting damages, and the local costs to repair such damage (e.g., hurricanes, on average—across the entire period considered, have lower average IHP award amounts [$3,118], than fires [$7,642]) Additionally, Members of Congress have sometimes expressed concern that FEMA IHP assistance helps “higher-income” households more than “lower-income” households. Analyzing the award data, CRS found that, for the gross income brackets considered in this report, IHP recipients in the higher income brackets generally received higher average IHP award amounts; however, a larger number of disaster survivors in lower income brackets received IHP awards.