What FEMA Does When There’s No Disaster

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When the Federal Emergency Management Agency appears in the national consciousness, it is almost always framed by disaster: officials in windbreakers surveying hurricane wreckage, urban search and rescue teams navigating collapsed buildings, or press conferences detailing the federal response to wildfires and floods.

This public image is accurate but incomplete. Much of FEMA’s work happens year-round between major disasters, focusing on risk reduction and preparedness.

This continuous, often unseen, effort is dedicated to a cycle of risk reduction, capability building, and meticulous planning. These activities help determine how well the nation withstands and recovers from future shocks and fulfill the agency’s core mission of helping people before, during, and after disasters.

The Blueprint for a Resilient Nation

This framework explains why the agency runs specific programs and reflects a shift of emergency management from a reactive, post-disaster function to a proactive, continuous discipline of risk management.

The National Preparedness Goal

At the heart of the nation’s strategy is the National Preparedness Goal, a unified vision for what it means for the entire country to be prepared for all hazards. he National Preparedness Goal is: “A secure and resilient nation with the capabilities required across the whole community to prevent, protect against, mitigate, respond to, and recover from the threats and hazards that pose the greatest risk.”

These risks are broad, including natural disasters, pandemics, chemical spills, cyber attacks, and acts of terrorism.

This national doctrine, established under Presidential Policy Directive 8, is built upon five core mission areas that represent the full life cycle of emergency management. While the public is most familiar with the “Response” and “Recovery” phases that follow a disaster, three of the five missions are proactive and form the core of FEMA’s year-round work:

Prevention

The ability to avoid or stop imminent threats, such as through intelligence and information sharing.

Protection

The ability to secure the homeland against acts of terrorism and other disasters, for example by ensuring supply chain integrity.

Mitigation

The ability to reduce the loss of life and property by lessening the impact of disasters, with a focus on building community resilience.

To achieve these missions, the framework identifies 32 core capabilities, or essential activities, that communities must develop. The system is designed to be flexible. Each capability is tied to a target that local jurisdictions can set for themselves based on their specific risks.

A coastal city might set a target for evacuation capacity, while a Midwestern city at high risk for tornadoes could set a target for the number of public shelters it needs. This tailored approach recognizes that preparedness is not one-size-fits-all and empowers communities to apply resources where they are most needed.

The 2022-2026 Strategic Plan

To address increasing disaster frequency and complexity, FEMA operates under a multi-year strategic plan that acts as its institutional roadmap. The 2022-2026 FEMA Strategic Plan, developed with input from over 1,000 employees and 400 external partners, including 50 tribal nations, outlines three ambitious goals that shape the agency’s current focus.

Instill Equity as a Foundation of Emergency Management

The plan begins with a high-level acknowledgment of past shortcomings. It explicitly states that “historically underserved communities experience differences in preparedness and mitigation measures as well as how quickly their communities can resume social and economic life after a disaster.”

This strategic goal commits the agency to actively re-engineering its programs, policies, and resource allocation to identify and eliminate disparities in outcomes for the nation’s most vulnerable populations.

Lead Whole of Community in Climate Resilience

Framing climate change as a “profound crisis for our nation,” the plan positions FEMA to lead the national effort in climate adaptation. Recognizing that climate change is driving more frequent and intense disasters, the agency has prioritized increasing “climate literacy” among emergency managers and the public.

A key component of this goal is leveraging FEMA’s extensive grant programs to target investments that help communities directly address their specific climate threats, thereby building more resilient infrastructure and societies.

Promote and Sustain a Ready FEMA and Prepared Nation

With the number of disasters FEMA manages annually having nearly tripled in a decade (from an average of 108 to 311), the demands on the emergency management profession have grown exponentially. This goal focuses on strengthening the workforce itself.

FEMA aims to advance the profession by supporting comprehensive training, education, and professional development that is accessible not just to its own employees but to the entire “whole community” of partners, from state officials to local volunteers.

Mitigation: Building Defenses Before the Storm

The most tangible and impactful of FEMA’s “quiet-year” activities fall under the mission of mitigation: any sustainable action that reduces or eliminates long-term risk to people and property from future disasters. These programs represent billions of dollars in proactive investment designed to break the costly cycle of disaster, damage, and repair.

The National Flood Insurance Program

Floods are the most common and costly natural disaster in the United States, yet most standard homeowners insurance policies do not cover flood damage. To address this gap, Congress created the National Flood Insurance Program in 1968. Managed by FEMA, the NFIP has a dual purpose: it offers primary flood insurance to properties in significant flood-risk areas, and it uses the availability of that insurance to persuade communities to adopt and enforce sound floodplain management standards.

The cornerstone of this effort is the creation and maintenance of Flood Insurance Rate Maps. These detailed maps, accessible to anyone through the FEMA Flood Map Service Center, identify a community’s flood hazards. They delineate different flood zones, with areas designated as having a 1% annual chance of flooding known as Special Flood Hazard Areas, or “high-risk” zones.

Participation in the NFIP is voluntary, but it has a strong incentive: in the more than 22,600 participating communities, property owners in SFHAs who have a mortgage from a federally backed or regulated lender are required to purchase flood insurance.

This requirement directly drives mitigation. To make NFIP insurance available to their residents, communities must adopt and enforce minimum floodplain management ordinances and building codes. These standards can include requirements for elevating new construction or ensuring that development does not obstruct natural floodplains.

The impact is significant. FEMA estimates that buildings constructed to NFIP standards suffer approximately 80% less damage annually from floods than those not in compliance.

To further incentivize proactive measures, FEMA administers the Community Rating System. This voluntary program recognizes and rewards communities that go beyond the minimum NFIP requirements.

By implementing more rigorous floodplain management practices, such as preserving open space, enforcing higher building standards, or conducting robust public outreach, communities can earn points. These points translate into direct discounts on flood insurance premiums for all policyholders in the community, ranging from 5% to as high as 45%.

The CRS creates a powerful feedback loop: better community-wide mitigation leads to lower financial risk for residents, making resilience an economically attractive choice for local governments.

The BRIC Program

While the NFIP focuses on flood risk, FEMA’s flagship pre-disaster grant program, Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, was designed to address all natural hazards. Launched in 2020, BRIC represented a strategic shift in federal policy, aiming to move funding from reactive post-disaster recovery to proactive, pre-disaster investment in community resilience.

The program’s funding mechanism was itself an innovation. Under the Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018, a 6% set-aside from the total federal assistance provided for every major disaster declaration was directed into a fund for pre-disaster mitigation. This created a more stable and predictable funding source for long-term projects, a departure from previous programs that relied on annual congressional appropriations.

BRIC grants were competitive and designed to fund a wide array of projects, with a special emphasis on protecting public infrastructure and “community lifelines”, the essential services like energy, water, communications, and transportation that enable a community to function. The program prioritized projects that incorporated nature-based solutions (like wetland restoration for flood control), enhanced climate resilience, and supported the adoption of modern, hazard-resistant building codes.

However, this program ended in April 2025, when FEMA issued a press release announcing it was stopping the BRIC program. The agency canceled the fiscal year 2024 funding opportunity and all pending applications from previous years where funds had not yet been distributed.

The administration’s rationale described BRIC as a “wasteful, politicized grant program,” stating that returning the funds to the Disaster Relief Fund or the U.S. Treasury would allow the agency to focus on its core mission of disaster response.

The decision was met with criticism from emergency management professionals and state officials. The Association of State Floodplain Managers labeled the move “beyond reckless,” pointing to numerous studies showing that every dollar spent on mitigation saves an average of $6 to $8 in future disaster costs (and $7 for flood mitigation specifically).

The impact was immediate, with states like Florida and Louisiana reported losing hundreds of millions of dollars in expected funding for resilience projects that were already years into development. According to a subsequent FEMA advisory, projects that were fully obligated and had already started construction could be completed, but those that were fully obligated but had not yet broken ground would be terminated.

The program’s cancellation illustrated challenges in sustaining proactive investment programs whose benefits, disasters that are less severe or prevented, are difficult to quantify in advance.

The controversy surrounding its cancellation notwithstanding, the projects funded during BRIC’s operation demonstrate the tangible nature of pre-disaster mitigation.

These examples illustrate how FEMA’s mitigation programs are designed as an interconnected system. The NFIP’s flood maps provide the data to identify risk. The insurance mandate creates a financial incentive to acknowledge that risk. Grant programs like BRIC then provide the capital investment needed to fund the large-scale projects, from hospital retrofits to community microgrids, that actually reduce the risk identified by the maps.

National Training and Exercises

Building physical defenses is only half the battle. A resilient nation also requires highly skilled professionals and well-rehearsed plans. During non-disaster periods, FEMA dedicates significant resources to developing the human capabilities necessary to manage complex emergencies, ensuring that when a crisis hits, responders at all levels of government can work together effectively.

The National Disaster and Emergency Management University

The focal point for this effort is the National Disaster and Emergency Management University, located at the National Emergency Training Center in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Formerly known as the Emergency Management Institute, NDEMU is the nation’s premier institution for emergency management training and education.

Its history traces back to the Civil Defense Staff College, founded in 1951 during the Cold War to train officials in skills like radiation monitoring and heavy rescue. Today, its mission is far broader, offering a full-spectrum curriculum of over 500 courses to an audience that includes federal, state, local, and tribal officials, as well as volunteer organizations and the private sector.

A key component of NDEMU’s mission is accessibility. Through its Independent Study Program, the institute offers hundreds of free, self-paced online courses to the public. These courses cover foundational concepts essential for a coordinated response.

For example, courses like IS-100: Introduction to the Incident Command System and IS-700: An Introduction to the National Incident Management System are prerequisites for many emergency responders across the country.

The widespread training on these standardized systems is about more than just technical proficiency. It creates a shared operational language and structure that can be scaled to any disaster. The National Incident Management System and its on-scene component, the Incident Command System, provide a common framework that allows responders from different agencies and jurisdictions, who may have never met before, to integrate seamlessly into a single, unified command structure.

This common playbook reduces the confusion and jurisdictional friction that can cost lives and waste critical time in the first hours of a response.

Beyond the foundational online courses, NDEMU offers advanced in-residence programs for career emergency managers. These include the Advanced Professional Series, which focuses on applied skills in disaster operations and management, and the highly specialized Master Exercise Practitioner Program, which trains professionals to design and conduct complex emergency exercises.

To participate in any of this training, individuals must register for a FEMA Student Identification number, a unique identifier that allows the agency to track their training progression throughout their careers.

The National Exercise Program

Training provides knowledge, but exercises test it. The National Exercise Program is the nation’s primary mechanism for validating plans, policies, and capabilities in a low-risk, cost-effective environment.

Managed by FEMA’s National Exercise Division, the NEP is structured as a multi-year cycle of exercises across the country, with each cycle guided by strategic priorities set by the National Security Council based on current threats and national preparedness data.

The program supports two main types of exercises:

Discussion-based exercises

These include seminars, workshops, and tabletop exercises where officials and stakeholders talk through their roles and responsibilities in a simulated crisis scenario.

Operations-based exercises

These are more hands-on and can range from drills, which test a single specific function, to full-scale exercises, which are complex, real-time simulations involving the movement of personnel and equipment.

State, local, tribal, and territorial jurisdictions can nominate their planned exercises for inclusion in the NEP. If selected, they receive no-cost assistance from FEMA’s expert exercise specialists, who can help with every phase of the process, from design and scenario development to conduct and evaluation.

The NEP’s value comes from discovering weaknesses during exercises, allowing communities to fix problems before real disasters occur. By creating complex, high-stress simulations, the program allows communities to “fail” in a safe environment.

An exercise that reveals a critical flaw in an evacuation plan, a gap in interoperable communications, or a shortage of a key resource is considered a profound success. It allows those problems to be identified and fixed before they can have deadly consequences during a real event.

The findings from these exercises are collected and analyzed to inform national preparedness policy, guide future training, and justify resource allocation decisions, creating an institutionalized cycle of testing, learning, and improvement. The program’s capstone is the National Level Exercise, a biennial, operations-based exercise that tests the nation’s capabilities to respond to a catastrophic event.

Empowering Communities and Citizens

While FEMA coordinates national strategy, the agency’s programs also reflect a core principle of emergency management: all disasters are local. Federal assistance takes time to arrive. Communities depend on prepared citizens and capable local responders. Much of FEMA’s year-round work supports these local capacities.

Much of FEMA’s year-round work is dedicated to strengthening this foundation of the national response pyramid.

The Ready Campaign

Since 2004, FEMA has managed the Ready Campaign, a major public education initiative designed to encourage all Americans to prepare for emergencies. The campaign’s public face is its website, Ready.gov, which provides a vast repository of information and tools centered on a simple, actionable message: Make a Plan, Build a Kit, Stay Informed.

The site offers a wealth of free, practical resources that can be used by any household. These include downloadable templates for creating a family emergency communication plan, comprehensive checklists for building an emergency supply kit, and detailed information sheets on preparing for, surviving, and recovering from specific hazards including hurricanes, wildfires, power outages, and cyberattacks.

Recognizing that preparedness needs vary, the Ready Campaign provides materials tailored for specific populations, including guides for older adults, people with disabilities, caregivers, and pet owners. It also emphasizes low- and no-cost preparedness steps, such as signing up for local alerts, storing important documents digitally, and building an emergency kit over time by adding one or two items during regular grocery trips.

This focus makes readiness more accessible to households regardless of their financial situation.

A critical part of the “Stay Informed” message is promoting the various public alert systems that FEMA manages or integrates with through its Integrated Public Alert and Warning System. These include Wireless Emergency Alerts sent to mobile phones, the traditional Emergency Alert System broadcast on TV and radio, and NOAA Weather Radios, all of which are crucial tools for disseminating life-saving information quickly during a crisis.

The U.S. Fire Administration

As a component of FEMA, the U.S. Fire Administration provides national leadership and support for the nation’s fire departments and emergency medical services organizations. Its primary mission is to reduce the nation’s loss of life and property from fire.

The USFA’s work is heavily data-driven. It maintains the National Fire Incident Reporting System, the world’s largest national database of fire incident information. By analyzing this data, the USFA can identify emerging fire trends and risks (for instance, those related to new building materials or consumer products) and use that information to guide national fire safety research, develop targeted public education campaigns, and create updated training curricula for firefighters.

This transforms NFIRS from a simple record-keeping system into a proactive, life-saving prevention tool.

The USFA also oversees the National Fire Academy, which is co-located with NDEMU in Maryland. The NFA serves as the nation’s premier institution for advanced professional development and technical training for mid-level and senior fire and EMS officers.

Assistance to Firefighters Grants

Perhaps the most direct way FEMA supports local first responders is through the Assistance to Firefighters Grants program. Since its inception in 2001, the AFG program has awarded approximately $8.7 billion in competitive grants directly to fire departments, nonaffiliated EMS organizations, and state fire training academies.

This funding addresses critical needs at the local level, paying for essential equipment, personal protective gear, emergency vehicles, and training that many communities would otherwise struggle to afford.

The AFG program is an umbrella for several distinct grant opportunities, each targeting a different aspect of first responder capability:

Assistance to Firefighters Grants

The main program, which funds a broad range of equipment, training, and vehicles.

Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response

Grants focused specifically on helping fire departments hire new firefighters or recruit and retain volunteer firefighters to meet industry staffing standards.

Fire Prevention and Safety

Grants that support projects aimed at reducing fire-related injuries and deaths among high-risk populations.

Together, these grant programs and public outreach campaigns represent a significant federal investment in strengthening the foundation of the national response system, recognizing that a prepared public and well-equipped local responders are the most effective first line of defense in any disaster.

Oversight and Challenges

The process of building national resilience is complex, and FEMA’s non-disaster programs are not without their challenges. Independent government watchdogs, such as the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office, conduct regular audits and evaluations of these programs.

Their findings provide essential balance, highlighting operational hurdles and areas for improvement that are critical for ensuring the effective and equitable use of taxpayer funds.

Mitigation Grant Management Issues

A 2022 report from the DHS OIG found significant issues with FEMA’s oversight and management of the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, a post-disaster program with functions similar to the pre-disaster BRIC program. The audit focused on property acquisitions, where FEMA funds are used to purchase flood-prone properties, demolish the structures, and maintain the land as permanent open space.

The OIG identified several key deficiencies. First, the program was not managed efficiently. Auditors found that FEMA regularly granted states more funds than were needed to complete projects and failed to promptly deobligate, or reclaim, the unused funds.

Second, the agency’s property records were incomplete, and it could not provide assurance that states and communities were actually monitoring the acquired properties to ensure they were being maintained as open space, as required by the grant terms. The report noted that FEMA had allowed states to prioritize immediate disaster response activities over collecting these long-term monitoring reports, highlighting a fundamental tension between accountability and flexibility.

Most critically, the OIG found that FEMA could not ensure that its mitigation grants were being awarded equitably. At the time of the audit, the agency had not developed a method for states to gather or use demographic and economic data when selecting which projects to fund. This meant FEMA could not be certain that projects in underserved or socially vulnerable communities were being given fair consideration, a finding that directly conflicts with the agency’s primary strategic goal of instilling equity as a foundation of its work.

Barriers for Tribal Nations and Rural Communities

A 2025 GAO report highlighted systemic barriers that prevent some of the most vulnerable communities from accessing FEMA’s non-disaster preparedness funding. The report focused on the Emergency Management Performance Grant program, which is the primary source of federal funding that helps state and local governments build and sustain their basic emergency management capabilities, such as paying for the salaries of emergency managers and developing preparedness plans.

The GAO found that, by statute, Tribal governments are not eligible to apply directly to FEMA for these critical grants. Instead, they must apply as sub-recipients through their state, which acts as an intermediary. This structure creates a significant barrier.

The investigation revealed that over a ten-year period (fiscal years 2014 through 2023), 17 states did not distribute a single dollar of EMPG funding to any of the Tribal nations within their borders.

This “last mile” problem, where high-level federal programs fail to reach their intended recipients, means that the communities most in need of assistance to build their emergency management capacity are often the least able to access it.

The GAO issued a “Matter for Congressional Consideration,” recommending that Congress consider creating a new program or amending an existing one to provide preparedness grants directly to Tribal governments. It also recommended that FEMA formally study the needs of Tribal nations and implement ways to improve flexibility in its programs for small and rural communities.

Workforce Challenges

Broader, systemic challenges also affect FEMA’s ability to carry out its non-disaster mission. The GAO has repeatedly identified long-standing issues with FEMA’s workforce management, including challenges in hiring and retaining a qualified disaster workforce and persistent staffing gaps that can hinder mission success.

While often highlighted in the context of major disaster response, these workforce capacity issues also impact the agency’s ability to effectively manage its numerous grant, training, and mitigation programs during “quiet” periods.

In a 2025 report, the GAO noted that a “reactive and fragmented federal approach to disaster risk reduction limits the nation’s resilience,” a finding that underscores the critical importance of the very proactive, non-disaster programs FEMA is tasked with administering.

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