Congress Funded 125 Disaster Projects. These Projects Were Not Grants. THE NEW GAME.

In June, FEMA published a list of 125 disaster mitigation projects that Congress had funded by name through the FY2026 appropriations bill. The total was $189.7 million, and none of it was competitive. These communities had already won.

Last week, FEMA announced the awards: more than $160 million for 115 projects.

Ten projects and roughly $25 to 30 million fell out between being named in the law and receiving an award. FEMA hasn't said why. Anyone who has worked a federal application knows the usual suspects: no approved hazard mitigation plan, no local match, an incomplete application, or a project that looked good in a member's request letter and fell apart on paper.

That should bother everyone in this field. It should bother me more than most, because readiness is the work my firm does every day.

This round also confirms something the industry has been slow to say out loud. Federal pre-disaster mitigation funding is now allocated by earmark. National competitive programs built on benefit-cost scoring have been scaled back, and what remains flows through congressional offices and state agencies. You can argue about whether that's good policy. Supporters say local officials and their representatives know local risk better than a federal scoring panel. Critics say it rewards political access over risk. Both sides have a point.

For a community with flood risk, the practical question is simpler: who gets the money now?

The answer is communities that do three things well. First, they get in front of their congressional delegation before the member request window opens, usually February through April. Second, they walk in with a project that is already scoped, costed, and backed by an approved local hazard mitigation plan. Third, they have the 25% local match identified before anyone asks. Small, low-income jurisdictions can qualify for 90% federal funding, but only if someone knows to claim it.

The communities that miss out aren't necessarily the ones with the least risk. They are often the ones with the least capacity: small towns, rural counties, and water districts with one general manager doing six jobs. The earmark system doesn't fix that gap. It widens it, because it adds a political step on top of a technical one.

Here is the uncomfortable part. Winning the earmark was the hard part, and those ten communities did it. They lost at the step that should have been routine.

If you lead a city, county, utility, or tribal government, don't ask whether you can get your project into the bill. Ask whether you could execute an application within 90 days of hearing your project was funded. If the answer involves a plan update, an unsecured match, or engineering that hasn't started, you're not ready. The FY2027 request cycle opens in a few months.

Where do you stand on this? Is earmark-driven mitigation funding a smarter way to reach local priorities, or a system that favors the best-connected communities? An earmark is not a grant. GMA knows how to acquire earmarks.

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