Grid coordination died in March 2025. Puerto Rico went dark in April

In October 2019, GAO told FEMA to establish a coordination mechanism⧉ among the many federal and Puerto Rico entities rebuilding the island's grid.▸ In June 2026, GAO's new report⧉ makes the same demand again — because the coordination body that later existed — the Energy Technical Coordination Team — was discontinued by DOE in March 2025 over "scheduling conflicts." Weeks later, on April 16, 2025, an island-wide blackout reached all 1.4 million electric customers for almost two days. The Secretary of Energy responded with emergency orders — still in force today — whose first page finds that "recent investments in the Puerto Rico grid have provided insignificant improvement." Those investments: $14.3 billion obligated since 2017, of which three-quarters has never been disbursed.

Six primary documents, read against each other: GAO-26-107772⧉, the new grid-recovery audit; its 2019 predecessor GAO-20-141⧉; DOE's two Federal Power Act §202(c) emergency orders of May 16, 2025; DOE's August 2025 first extension⧉ of both orders — extended four times in all, most recently through August 9, 2026, per the GAO report; and the September 2020 White House statement⧉ announcing $9.6 billion for PREPA within almost $13 billion of grants it called "the largest obligations of funding ever awarded" — together exceeded, it noted, only by Katrina and Sandy.

The federal ledger has three columns, and the story lives in the gap between two of them.▸ FEMA has obligated $11.1 billion⧉ — legally committed it — but only $2.7 billion has been disbursed; HUD has disbursed $0.6 billion of $2.3 billion; DOE $0.3 billion of $0.9 billion. Across the three agencies, 75 percent of obligated funds have not been paid out; disbursement mostly works as reimbursement, so money moves only after PREPA has already spent it. The report also records money moving backward: DOE has reallotted or canceled about $715 million originally meant for community and low-income solar — including up to $350 million in Solar Access Program grants canceled in January 2026 — for needs "yet to be determined." A further $7.6 billion in potential FEMA hazard-mitigation benefits sits mostly untouched ($661 million obligated) and expires in September 2027.

The grid serves about 1.5 million customers, and its failures reach nearly all of them at once: the April 16, 2025 blackout took down the entire island for almost two days.▸ DOE's order records the arithmetic of fragility — a single forced outage at Costa Sur Unit 5 shed load for 200,000 customers, and the grid operator's own analysis warns that another baseload failure could mean "up to 135 days and 1,102 hours of load shedding." The cheapest defense is the least done: LUMA reported to DOE 23 vegetation-caused transmission events in twelve months — over 2.2 million customer interruptions, 1.5 billion customer-minutes — and estimates full clearing would prevent more than 80 percent of them. As of February 2026, the federally funded clearing program had covered 400 of 16,000 planned miles.

The first disagreement is between GAO and GAO — seven years apart, about the same absence.▸ The 2019 report's Recommendation 3: FEMA should establish "a mechanism, or take steps to improve existing mechanisms, for coordination among the multiple local and federal entities involved in grid recovery." GAO's new report says the agencies addressed its 2019 recommendations. The 2026 report's finding: "a formal mechanism for coordination among all federal and Puerto Rico entities involved in Puerto Rico's grid recovery does not exist." What happened in between is documented in one paragraph on page 46: DOE discontinued the Energy Technical Coordination Team's meetings in March 2025, citing scheduling conflicts, with no future meetings scheduled — and told GAO in December 2025 that meeting "as-needed" was more efficient. Recommendation 5 of the new report orders the mechanism rebuilt, addressed this time to DOE. DHS and DOE agreed with every recommendation.

The second disagreement is between the promise and the emergency order.▸ September 2020: the White House announces $9.6 billion for PREPA⧉ to "repair and replace thousands of miles of transmission and distribution lines," within the largest pair of FEMA infrastructure grants in history. May 2025: the Secretary of Energy, invoking emergency authority reserved for wartime and grid crises, finds that "recent investments in the Puerto Rico grid have provided insignificant improvement towards augmenting reliability and security of the grid" — and orders PREPA to keep dozens of aging fossil units dispatched and to perform the vegetation management the funded program hadn't delivered. The orders have been renewed repeatedly and now run through August 9, 2026.

GAO makes five recommendations — three to FEMA on the environmental-review bottleneck (stakeholders said reviews can add months or years per project), two to DOE on documented roles and the coordination mechanism; all five accepted.▸ The hard deadlines are set by other documents: DOE's emergency orders expire August 9, 2026, in the heart of hurricane season; the $7.6 billion hazard-mitigation window closes in September 2027. As of December 2025, 116 large FEMA projects were more than 75 percent complete, so the disbursement curve should finally steepen — but nine years after Maria, the completed-projects column reads nine.