Trends in the use of US federal emergency supplemental appropriations for disasters

Abstract

Federal appropriation for disaster prevention through recovery occurs across a complex landscape of funding mechanisms. Emergency supplemental appropriations are one such mechanism and increasingly a way that Congress funds disasters. These bills also often include nondisaster-related spending. To better identify congressional tendencies in the use of emergency appropriations for disasters, including the frequency and dollar value of such spending, we analyzed publicly available data on emergency appropriations over the first two decades of the 21^st century. Using legislative appropriations data from the Congressional Budget Office for all supplemental appropriations enacted for fiscal years 2000 through 2020, we calculated that nondefense spending for disasters via supplemental appropriation represented USD 1.024 trillion in budget authority across 40 bills over this period. Natural disaster emergencies accounted for 58 percent of the federal government’s emergency supplemental spending, with the rest generally related to Global War on Terror and other military activities. Among the spending prompted by presidential request, the difference between how much funding the president had requested for that emergency (if any) and a congressional appropriation of emergency funding reveals no apparent trend over the time period studied, although confirmatory analysis is obscured by a dearth of data points. As the risk of disasters and, particularly, the rate and size of billion-dollar disasters increases, characterizing the congressional approach to the funding of disasters may allow improved understanding of whether this approach is optimized to meet the needs of disasters in the 21^st century and whether response spending should be mitigated through proactive and routine appropriations toward resilience targets.