There are a lot of ways for disaster victims to get help in the immediate aftermath of a flood or fire. The Federal Emergency Management Agency gives out temporary housing assistance and pays for debris removal, insurance companies pay to rebuild homes and replace lost valuables, and charity groups pass out food and water.
But the long-term recovery from a major disaster is a lot harder. It can take a community years to build back from a major hurricane or wildfire, and the United States only has one federal program to help. Run by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program has provided more than $100 billion to disaster areas over the last few decades, but almost everyone agrees that it is broken. The program operates on an ad hoc basis, without permanent congressional approval, so most of its disaster grants take more than half a decade to execute and arrive too late to make a difference.
That is about to change. Last month, Congress passed a major bipartisan housing bill with an endorsement from President Donald Trump. The president has said he will not sign the bill because Congress has not passed voting restrictions, but it will become law at the end of today if he does not veto it. Congress has enough votes to override a potential veto anyway.
The bill’s primary focus is on building more homes in areas that are suffering from housing shortages, but it also contains a little-noticed provision that will turn HUD’s sporadic disaster aid into a permanent program. The change could prevent the stagnation that often happens in disaster areas when displaced families struggle to find housing and businesses shut down.
“All the tumblers are there to make it work now,” said Stan Gimont, a former HUD official who oversaw the disaster grant program under the Obama and first Trump administrations. “They all line up, and it should all go a lot more quickly.”
The issues with HUD’s block grant recovery program are numerous and notorious. Without permanent authorization from Congress, lawmakers have to approve new investments after each disaster, which can take months or years if it happens at all. Similarly, the department has to go through an onerous federal rulemaking process every time it receives money. Even once a disaster-affected community gets approval to spend money on new housing, or tenant assistance, or rebuilt infrastructure, it can take years to conduct the necessary environmental reviews.
A case in point is the coastal town of New Bern, North Carolina, which lost hundreds of affordable apartments after it was flooded by Hurricane Florence in 2018. A Grist investigation of disaster recovery there found that it took more than five years to build a few dozen apartments with HUD money. By the time the new complexes opened in New Bern, the tenants who had lost their apartments back in 2018 had moved on to other cities.
In other cases, the spending timelines have extended even longer. Some grantees who received money after the 2017 California wildfires or 2012’s Hurricane Sandy are still trying to access the funds owed to them. In a report last month, HUD said it was “targeting for closeout” a grant that was supposed to help Arkansas recover from tornadoes that occurred in 2008. A 2024 report by the department’s internal auditor found that these delays were caused by the program’s ad hoc authorization and by failed coordination between HUD and other agencies.
“Without permanent authorization and a permanent funding stream, you’re kind of left reinventing the wheel every time,” said Stan Gimont, the former HUD official, who is now a senior advisor at the disaster recovery consulting firm Hagerty Consulting.
The language in the new housing bill would free up HUD to spend money without waiting for congressional approval, endow a new disaster recovery fund, and create a permanent disaster unit within the department. This is similar to how FEMA, housed within the Department of Homeland Security, operates now. An accelerated timeline would allow HUD to start spending money in disaster areas as soon as FEMA’s aid winds down, rather than having to wait years after a disaster strikes. This could speed up the construction of new affordable apartment buildings or the demolition of flood-prone homes, or even fast-track financial support for new businesses and job training programs.
“It really helps,” said Carlos Martín, the vice president for research at the think tank Resources for the Future, who has spent years studying the HUD program. “FEMA assistance goes for 18 months maximum, and then HUD assistance often wouldn’t kick in for two or three years after that. There’s been this valley of death in recovery, and this just decreases that valley of death to being more like a crack, and fewer people can slip through that crack.”
The new authorization in the housing bill is not technically permanent; in order to appease Republicans in the House of Representatives, lawmakers added a sunset provision that will wind down the aid program after three years. But another “sense of Congress” clause in the law suggests that the block-grant program could continue indefinitely as long as there is money available, and Martín said it’s unlikely lawmakers will wind it down after creating a new unit to manage it.
“It really was a bipartisan agreement,” he said.
