FEMA's Search-and-Rescue System Just Got Its Biggest Raise in 20 Years — to $56 Million. Its Former Branch Chief Says the Job Costs Nearly Twice That.

The National Urban Search and Rescue Response System is 28 task forces — elite collapse-rescue teams sponsored by local fire departments from California to Massachusetts — built into the federal disaster response system after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.▸ FEMA doesn't employ the people who do the work. It certifies them, equips them through cooperative agreements with their host fire departments, and activates them, on FEMA's own dime, only when a governor or the agency itself calls a disaster. Every other day, the roughly 5,880 people on the System's rosters are paramedics, structural engineers, canine handlers, and firefighters on their home department's payroll, training on their own time to keep a credential current for a deployment that may never come — or may come nine times in a single year, which is what happened in 2024, tying the System's busiest year since 1999.

Federal funding for the System has never tracked a straight line.▸ The Congressional Research Service's history of the program shows Congress funding it at $60 million in both FY2003 and FY2004, in the buildup after the September 11 attacks — then cutting it in half, to $30 million, by FY2005, and down further to $32.5 million by FY2010. For most of the fifteen years after that, former FEMA U.S.&R branch chief Ken Pagurek told NPR in December 2025, funding stayed roughly flat around $40 million a year even as the System kept answering more calls. FEMA's own Fiscal Year 2025 Readiness Cooperative Agreement put a number on that plateau: $40.3 million split across all 28 task forces, individual awards ranging $1.3 million to $1.6 million — not enough, in any single award, to cover what one task force costs to run.

That changed in March 2026.▸ The Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2026 (H.R. 7744), signed by the president after a shutdown that had partly closed DHS since mid-February, raised US&R funding to $56 million — an increase of roughly $15 million that Reps. Kevin Mullin, Jill Tokuda, and Young Kim, who led a 40-member bipartisan coalition pushing for it, called the largest single-year raise the program has received in at least two decades. Menlo Park Fire Protection District Chief Mark Lorenzen, whose department sponsors California Task Force 3, told the San Mateo Daily Journal his department had "been struggling for over a decade to make ends meet, as have the other 27 task forces."

The increase is real.▸ It is also, by the account of the person who used to run the program, still short of what the job costs. Pagurek told NPR that properly funding the System costs "nearly twice" what Congress had been paying — at the roughly $40 million baseline in place when he spoke, that points to a real annual cost closer to $80 million than to the $56 million now enacted. Even after the largest raise in decades, the federal government is paying for a system its own former chief says needs close to double.

The shortfall is not a new discovery.▸ A February 2016 Government Accountability Office report reviewing FEMA's disaster response programs found that all nine task forces GAO interviewed reported difficulty funding the maintenance and replacement of their aging equipment, and recommended FEMA build a plan to prioritize and pay for it. Congress responded that December with the National Urban Search and Rescue Response System Act of 2016 (Public Law 114-326), which wrote a life-cycle equipment-replacement planning requirement into law. A decade later, the underlying funding gap GAO documented is the same one lawmakers cited in 2026 to justify the raise — and, on Pagurek's own estimate, the raise still doesn't close it. What the federal cooperative agreement doesn't cover, host fire departments absorb out of local budgets: salaries while members train, warehouse rent for equipment caches, vehicle maintenance between deployments.

Each task force keeps a roster of up to 210 trained members — firefighters, paramedics, structural engineers, canine handlers, hazmat technicians — so that a fully staffed, FEMA-typed 70-member Type I team can always be pulled together, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department's account of the requirement.▸ Miami-Dade's Florida Task Force 1 gives its members a six-hour window to report to a departure point once a disaster's called. Multiply the 210-member roster standard by 28 task forces and the System's total certified strength is roughly 5,880 people — nearly all of them already working full-time jobs in their home departments, trained and held in reserve for work that is, in most years, unpaid.

That reserve got called on nine times in 2024, tied for the System's busiest year since 1999, covering hurricanes, wildfires, and building collapses in a single fiscal year.▸ FEMA pays activation costs only once a task force is deployed under a presidential disaster declaration or a FEMA mission assignment — every dollar spent keeping the roster trained, equipped, and ready to answer that six-hour window comes from the cooperative agreement, and from whatever the host department covers on top of it.

Fiscal year figures for FY2003 through FY2010 come from a Congressional Research Service report last updated in April 2010; FY2025 and FY2026 figures are drawn from FEMA's own cooperative agreement notice and the enacted FY2026 DHS appropriations act, respectively. The "nearly twice" cost estimate is Ken Pagurek's, given to NPR in December 2025 against the roughly $40 million funding level in place at that time, not an official FEMA or GAO figure — Congress has not published its own current estimate of what the System costs to run.