During Hurricane Milton, up to 77% of FEMA's calls went unanswered
Summary
FEMA delivered $3.2 billion in assistance to 1.2 million disaster survivors across nine states, according to GAO's third Disaster Assistance High-Risk Series report. But when Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit back to back in 2024, the agency's helpline buckled -- unanswered call rates climbed as high as 77 percent, and wait times peaked at over two hours. A companion GAO report on state and local capacity, examining the same 10 states, found the government is already moving to shift more of this work onto them: FEMA ended door-to-door outreach in June 2025 and is leaning harder on state-run recovery centers. But the states' own 2024 self-assessments show wildly uneven readiness -- meeting anywhere from 12 to 90 percent of their disaster-response targets, and for the specific job of moving survivors into temporary housing, anywhere from 10 to 100 percent.
The helpline held up once. Twice, it didn't.
's disaster helpline is one of three ways survivors can reach the agency, along with DisasterAssistance.gov and in-person Disaster Recovery Centers. About 70 percent of applicants use the website; the rest lean on the helpline or in-person visits. After the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, the system worked as intended: 99 percent of calls were answered from the start of the fires through the end of the month, and California's own emergency-services officials described the volume as manageable. Hurricanes Helene and Milton were a different story. Survivors made more than 124,000 calls the day before Milton's landfall alone, with 39 percent going unanswered.
In the two weeks that followed, the daily unanswered rate climbed as high as 77 percent, and the average wait to reach a representative peaked at 2 hours and 14 minutes on October 13, 2024. Wait times didn't fall back under 10 minutes for a full day until November 1 -- 23 days after Milton made landfall. officials told the agency was still absorbing calls from Hurricane Beryl survivors when Helene and Milton hit. The Texas floods repeated the pattern in miniature: from July 6 to July 10, 2025, unanswered calls reached 84 percent and wait times averaged about an hour on three straight days, after had cut its surge-calling staff roughly in half once call volumes normalized earlier in the year.
Where the $3.2 billion went, and who didn't get any
The dollars were as lopsided as the call volume. Of the $3.2 billion in housing and other-needs assistance FEMA had approved as of September 30, 2025⧉, roughly 67 percent went to Hurricane Helene survivors alone -- $2.2 billion, against $863.4 million for Milton, $162.4 million for the LA wildfires, and $39.5 million for the Texas floods. But approval didn't track need evenly either. Only about 54 percent of Helene's 1.5 million applicants ultimately received housing or other-needs assistance, and that was the best rate of the four: Milton's approval rate was roughly 28 percent, the Texas floods' about 35 percent, and the LA wildfires' just under 13 percent -- the lowest of any disaster in the report, out of 274,663 applications filed.
View data as table
| Hurricane Helene | 2,200 |
|---|---|
| Hurricane Milton | 863.4 |
| LA Wildfires | 162.4 |
| Texas Floods | 39.5 |
View data as table
| Helene - applications | 1,515,910 |
|---|---|
| Helene - received assistance | 815,483 |
| Milton - applications | 1,078,702 |
| Milton - received assistance | 300,891 |
| LA Wildfires - applications | 274,663 |
| LA Wildfires - received assistance | 35,027 |
| TX Floods - applications | 10,645 |
| TX Floods - received assistance | 3,752 |
The states picking up the slack grade themselves 12 to 90 percent ready
is already moving work downstream. A May 2025 memo told the agency to prioritize fixed facilities over unaccompanied door-to-door canvassing; a June 2025 memo ended that canvassing entirely, on the strength of 's own finding that it produces less than 2 percent of total registrations. Meanwhile, GAO's companion report⧉ examined how ready the affected states actually are to absorb more of this work. It analyzed the same 10 states' 2024 preparedness self-assessments against 33 targets spanning 15 federally defined response capabilities -- things like restoring power, running search-and-rescue operations, and moving people into shelter. Every one of the 10 states fell short of at least one target. The share of targets each state said it could fully meet ranged from 12 to 90 percent. For the specific task of moving displaced people into temporary housing, self-estimated capability ranged from 10 percent in one state to 100 percent in another, with a 40 percent median. Search-and-rescue capability showed the same spread: three states put themselves at 90 to 100 percent, two at 57 and 60 percent, and five at 33 percent or below.
View data as table
| 90%-100% of target | 3 |
|---|---|
| 57%-60% of target | 2 |
| 33% of target or below | 5 |
The states most exposed to a federal pullback are also the ones most dependent on federal money to run what capability they have. has awarded almost $15 billion through its three main preparedness grant programs since fiscal 2014, and six of the states surveyed said those grants fund between 42 and 74 percent of their emergency management workforce. recommended back in 2012 that update the fiscal-capacity test it uses to decide whether a state can handle a disaster on its own -- including adjusting it for inflation, which the agency has never done. As of September 2025, that recommendation remained open, 13 years after made it.
Letters that said "not approved" when the answer was "not yet"
Some of the friction documented wasn't about staffing at all -- it was about wording. Letters sent Helene and Milton survivors in 2024 asking for insurance documentation opened, in bold, with "assistance not approved," followed by "not currently approved" and then "no decision." found survivors and local officials alike read that as a final denial, even when it wasn't. revised the language starting with the Los Angeles wildfires in January 2025, leading with "please read carefully" and explaining upfront what the agency still needed. It's the second time has had to fix this: a 2020 review made 14 recommendations to improve Individual Assistance overall, including on this same letter-clarity problem, and implemented all of them by 2022. In North Carolina, meanwhile, found over 300 families still needed longer-term housing five months after Helene, with only 110 in the process of moving into -provided trailers -- and local officials said they'd had to pay $500,000 for a private consultant just to coordinate the utility and permitting work 's contractors couldn't handle directly with the county.
The takeaway
- 's own delivery system buckled under real disasters, not hypothetical ones. The Los Angeles wildfires -- a single, geographically contained event -- saw 99 percent of helpline calls answered. Two hurricanes landing two weeks apart pushed the unanswered rate to 77 percent and wait times past two hours; a smaller flood event eight months later still hit 84 percent unanswered, after had trimmed its own surge capacity.
- The states in line to take on more of this work don't agree on how ready they are. Self-graded against their own targets, the 10 states sampled ranged from 12 to 90 percent prepared overall, and from 10 to 100 percent on the specific task of moving survivors into housing. Six of them fund nearly half or more of their emergency-management workforce with the same federal grants any handoff would presumably reduce.
- The fixes has asked for are old, and some are still open. implemented all 14 of 's 2020 recommendations to improve Individual Assistance, including on its confusing determination letters, then had to revise the letters again in 2024 after reintroducing the same kind of confusion those recommendations were meant to fix. A 2012 recommendation to update how tests a state's fiscal capacity to handle a disaster on its own -- the test that would matter most if more responsibility shifts to the states -- has been open for 13 years.
Survivor-assistance, helpline, and dollar figures are from -26-108154, 'Disaster Assistance High-Risk Series: Assistance for Disaster Survivors' (April 22, 2026), the third report in 's Disaster Assistance High-Risk Series. State and local preparedness-capability figures are from -26-108599, 'Disaster Assistance High-Risk Series: State and Local Response Capabilities' (December 18, 2025), the second report in the same series, examining the same 10 states (California, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia). Both were read directly. The state preparedness self-assessments are self-reported against self-set targets and, per , are not generalizable to all 50 states.
Sources(2) ▾
- U.S. Government Accountability Office, Disaster Assistance High-Risk Series: FEMA Assistance for Disaster Survivors (2026-04-22) — -26-108154, report to congressional addressees. Third report in 's Disaster Assistance High-Risk Series. Direct gao.gov access returns HTTP 403 (Akamai block on automated requests); read via the Wayback Machine capture below, downloaded and read in full (23 pages). gao.gov · original document
- U.S. Government Accountability Office, Disaster Assistance High-Risk Series: State and Local Response Capabilities (2025-12-18) — -26-108599, report to congressional addressees. Second report in 's Disaster Assistance High-Risk Series. Direct gao.gov access returns HTTP 403; read via the Wayback Machine capture below, downloaded and read in full (16 pages). gao.gov · original document
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delivered $3.2 billion in assistance to 1.2 million survivors of four recent disasters, reported in April. It also found that when Hurricanes Helene and Milton struck two weeks apart in 2024, survivors calling 's helpline faced unanswered-call rates as high as 77 percent and wait times that peaked at over two hours -- a strain that resurfaced during the July 2025 Texas floods, when up to 84 percent of daily calls went unanswered. A second report, examining the same set of disasters from the state and local side, found the government is already leaning on states to do more: ended door-to-door survivor outreach in June 2025 and is prioritizing state-run recovery centers over its own fixed sites. But the same 10 states' own 2024 preparedness self-assessments show they don't meet their own response targets consistently -- hitting anywhere from 12 to 90 percent of them, with even wider swings on specific tasks like moving people into housing.