EDA's $2.1 billion in disaster grants: it can't say what worked

The Economic Development Administration has awarded about $2.1 billion in disaster recovery grants since 2014 and coordinated 45 missions of the federal government's Economic Recovery Support Function since 2013.▸ A July 2026 GAO report⧉ found that none of EDA's 26 fiscal year 2024 performance measures assess whether any of that work achieves economic recovery, and that EDA suspended the site visits it once used to check grantee-reported outcome data during the COVID-19 pandemic and never resumed them. A 2023 Commerce Inspector General audit⧉ of one $587 million slice of that money -- 154 grants awarded after the 2019 disaster supplemental -- found the mechanism that would have fed EDA the data it lacks was itself broken: more than a third of the financial reports due on a 31-grant sample came in late, and EDA's own project officers skipped the follow-up their manual required on more than a quarter of the late reports.

EDA, a bureau of the Commerce Department, is both a grantmaker and a coordinator.▸ Under its Economic Adjustment Assistance program it awards disaster recovery grants directly to state and local governments, tribes, and nonprofits -- $2.1 billion of them from fiscal years 2014 through 2024, funded partly by $3.2 billion in disaster supplemental appropriations Congress provided from 2018 through 2025. Separately, EDA leads the Economic RSF, an interagency mechanism under the National Disaster Recovery Framework that calls on 13 other federal agencies -- FEMA, HUD, Labor, Agriculture, Treasury, and more -- to coordinate technical assistance and financial aid after a disaster. EDA ran 45 such missions between 2013 and 2025, most after hurricanes, floods, and severe storms in the South.

On the coordination side, GAO found EDA's performance was mixed but not damning: of eight leading practices GAO uses to assess interagency collaboration, EDA generally incorporated five -- defining common outcomes, clarifying roles, sustaining leadership -- and partially incorporated the other three, including the most consequential one: ensuring accountability.▸ EDA has no way to monitor, assess, or communicate progress toward any of the Economic RSF's four strategic outcomes, from stabilizing disaster-hit businesses to building local governments' capacity to navigate federal recovery money.

The RSF's capacity to actually run missions has also deteriorated.▸ A FEMA internal readiness assessment from July 2025 rated the Economic RSF the weakest of the federal government's six Recovery Support Functions. As of April 2026, EDA had zero active Economic RSF missions and had already turned down at least one FEMA request to activate the RSF, following the 2025 California wildfires -- a decision GAO ties to EDA's shrinking disaster recovery staff, down to 185 employees in April 2026 from 324 in fiscal year 2023. The lag shows up on the ground: after the 2023 Hawaii wildfires, it took EDA about two years to make its first disaster recovery grant award under the relevant supplemental appropriation, and as of June 2026 EDA still hadn't announced a single award to a Hawaiian grantee from it -- even as FEMA and SBA money reached the islands within days.

The grants themselves went overwhelmingly to concrete and infrastructure -- 45 percent to utilities, roadways, and other public infrastructure, and another 36 percent to construction of business, medical, and training facilities.▸ Some of what that money bought is still waiting: a $5 million seawall EDA funded in 2024 to protect Sanford, Florida's downtown marina hadn't broken ground as of July 2025. A $3 million grant to replace flood-pump equipment in Tulsa, Oklahoma -- awarded in 2020, four years after severe storms -- was, as of August 2025, still running on equipment about 80 years old; one pump station activates using a glass bottle on a string and mercury-filled switches that trigger as floodwaters rise.

None of that -- not the seawall, not the pump station, not the $2.1 billion total -- shows up in a measure of whether disaster recovery grants work, because EDA doesn't have one.▸ Its fiscal year 2024 performance measures generally incorporated four of GAO's nine attributes of a successful measure -- they were clear, objective, had numerical targets, and didn't overlap -- but partially failed on the attribute that matters most here: covering EDA's core program activities. None of the 26 measures assessed disaster recovery. The clearest evidence of what that blind spot is hiding: in a GAO review of 292 disaster recovery construction and revolving-loan grants awarded from 2014 through 2022, 55 percent of grantees reported creating or retaining zero jobs and generating zero private investment after three years. After six years, 31 percent still reported nothing. And EDA cannot vouch for even the data it does have -- it suspended the site visits it once used to validate grantee-reported job and investment figures during the pandemic and, as of December 2025, had not resumed them.

GAO's report is a systemwide assessment; it didn't open a single grant file.▸ The Commerce Inspector General's 2023 audit did. EDA had allocated $587 million from the 2019 disaster supplemental across its six regional offices -- from $50 million each to Austin, Chicago, and Philadelphia up to $190 million for Seattle -- and awarded 154 grants worth $450 million under that funding by August 2021. OIG built a judgmental sample of the 31 largest construction grants, worth $287.6 million (64 percent of the dollars, from just 20 percent of the grants), and checked whether EDA was actually monitoring them. Its topline finding was not damning either: EDA generally monitored the grants, and OIG found no fraud, waste, or abuse. The problem was narrower and more mundane -- and, in the report's own accounting, still a compliance violation.

Grantees were required to file quarterly Project Progress Reports and semiannual Federal Financial Reports so EDA's project officers could track whether construction was on schedule and money was being spent as approved.▸ Of 115 progress reports due, 30 came in late, an average of 45 days, one 192 days late. Of 49 financial reports due, 17 came in late -- 36 percent -- averaging 88 days late, with one report submitted 495 days after it was due. EDA's own Grants Manual is explicit about what happens next: when a report is more than 45 business days overdue, a project officer "should follow-up with the recipient about the delinquent report in writing and should retain a copy of such communication in the official project file." OIG found that didn't happen for 8 of the 30 late progress reports and 6 of the 17 late financial reports -- more than a quarter of the delinquencies EDA's own rules said required a written follow-up that its own project officers never sent.

EDA concurred with OIG's single recommendation -- to strengthen monitoring so project officers actually follow up in writing -- and attributed the lapse to pandemic-era staffing strain: CARES Act and American Rescue Plan supplemental funding had swelled EDA's workload faster than it could hire, and, in the agency's own words, "some projects funded with no-year funds during this period were not tracked as diligently as they would otherwise have been."▸ At the time of the audit, only $10 million of the $287.6 million sample had actually been disbursed, since most of the construction projects were still in planning -- meaning the reports that went unread and the follow-ups that never happened were, for now, the only real-time signal EDA had that these projects were on track at all.