"The Federal Emergency Management Agency has wasted more than $3 billion and misused thousands of its employees by responding to hundreds of undersized floods, storms and other events that states could have handled on their own, an investigation by E&E News shows.
FEMA has chronically overestimated the damage to U.S. states from small disasters and underestimated the capacity of states to respond to them. Those errors triggered at least 325 unnecessary deployments of money and personnel since 1998.
The errors also resulted in homeowners and businesses receiving $725 million in low-interest disaster loans from the Small Business Administration, E&E News found.
FEMA has deployed staff to small disasters for decades, even as federal auditors warned that it was sending emergency workers and money to states that may not need the help. Federal law says FEMA is supposed to assist with disasters only when they threaten to overwhelm a state's ability to respond."
