Federal gridlock continues to stall Helene recovery
Western North Carolina’s road to recovery remains fraught with challenges.
Bob Scott photo
Nearly 15 months after Hurricane Helene tore through rural Appalachia, North Carolina recovery officials said in a Dec. 15 meeting and press conference that federal recovery programs meant to help communities rebuild after $60 billion in damages are still slowing them down.
Michael Whatley, appointed by President Donald Trump as Helene recovery czar in January, has spoken to the head of the governor’s recovery task force only once this year.
“That was in September, in conjunction with the review council meeting in Western North Carolina held in Asheville,” said Matt Calabria, director of the Governor’s Recovery Office for Western North Carolina. “We talked about the improvements that we were hoping to see and are hoping to see in FEMA as we go forward.”
In April, an investigation by The Smoky Mountain News found that by the six-month anniversary of the storm, local governments across the region had seen just 4% of funding needs met. Near the nine-month anniversary, the Asheville Citizen-Times reported that total had reached 6%. By the one-year anniversary, Gov. Josh Stein reported 9%.
Calabria said that although he can testify to some successes in speeding up project reviews by the Department of Government Efficiency, nothing has really changed since his conversation with Whatley in September.
“We are currently working through the same issues that we’ve been dealing with before,” Calabria said. “We know that a lot of these work streams take a long time, but we have continued to see delays in approval of FEMA [public assistance] projects, and there are a significant amount of projects that are still outstanding and working through various processes.”
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Among the roadblocks mentioned by Calabria were shifting FEMA requirements and frequent turnover among on-the-ground staff, which officials say has repeatedly disrupted projects already underway. Communities report that a FEMA staffer may approve or “green-light” elements of a project, only for that person to be reassigned, forcing local governments to revisit prior decisions, resubmit materials or effectively start over.
“In a lot of ways, we’re seeing things continue as they have before,” Calabria said. “We’re continuing to push on delays related to FEMA associated with public assistance programs and hazard mitigation programs in particular.”
Don Campbell, chief of staff for the Division of Emergency Management at the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, said during the GROW NC meeting that the scale of work underway remains enormous, but the pace of federal approvals has become a serious problem.
More than 4,000 FEMA public assistance projects tied to Hurricane Helene are currently active statewide, with nearly 1,900 already approved and obligated for more than $981.6 million in federal funding — a total that has surpassed Hurricane Florence’s public assistance payouts in a fraction of the time. Campbell said that reflects meaningful progress, but emphasized that hundreds of projects remain unfinished, significant work still lies ahead and obstacles continue to slow recovery efforts.
“One of the barriers that many of you are aware of is that any project that is over $100,000 still requires the personal signature of the secretary of Homeland Security,” Campbell said, noting 49 such projects totaling $68 million.
Even when approvals are granted, Campbell said, North Carolina has struggled to actually draw down federal funds because of additional layers inside federal payment systems.
“When they get on that final list, we also then continue to run into challenges being able to pull those federal dollars down from the federal government because of the DOGE ‘defend the spend’ process that is built into [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] payment systems which FEMA utilizes for public assistance,” he said.
Campbell added that state officials have managed to reduce some delays by fiddling with keywords and using other administrative tools to change how information is packaged and submitted to the federal government — cutting some approval timelines from as long as 90 days down to as little as 48 hours — but other speedbumps remain out of the state’s control.
Debris removal projects have been hit particularly hard. Several counties opted to manage debris cleanup themselves rather than rely on the Army Corps of Engineers, a decision Campbell praised but said has exposed them to extra scrutiny.
“We also recognize that those debris projects in many of our counties are being held up through a number of additional reviews through FEMA,” Campbell said. “We are continuing to work with FEMA to try to expedite those processes so those debris projects can, most importantly, be reimbursed, because the funding that is needed for those projects needs to get back to our counties so they can continue to use those funds for other areas of their recovery overall.”
Those conclusions represent a reality far detached from what Whatley — appointed by Trump on Jan. 24 to make sure “everything goes well” — has been telling the press across the state.
In a May podcast appearance with Spectrum’s Tim Boyum, Whatley claimed FEMA had “eliminated the red tape” and that there had been a “massive acceleration” in debris removal.
On Aug. 1, a story in the Asheville Citizen-Times suggested debris removal had actually slowed. Local governments continued to report denials.
On Aug. 8, a FEMA official directly contradicted Whatley on the elimination of red tape, saying the delays in federal relief were due to “new red tape.”
Later that month, former Gov. Roy Cooper told SMN in hard-hit Chimney Rock that he did not think everything was “going well” with recovery and said that Whatley was part of the problem.
“Washington, D.C. insiders have made it so much more difficult for people in Western North Carolina to recover, and in fact, people in Western North Carolina have been left holding the bag,” Cooper said.
Cooper, a Democrat, is likely to face Whatley, a Republican, in the race for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Republican Thom Tillis next year. Cooper and Whatley have Primary Election opponents, but are both expected to prevail.
In October, Western North Carolina residents — even Republicans — were harshly critical of Whatley’s performance, with one essentially saying Whatley should step down because he never really stepped up.
Around that time, 120 people from 17 affected counties signed a letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and FEMA Review Council co-chair Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, asking them to remove Whatley from his oversight role. That obviously didn’t happen; however, a new petition with even more signatures is circulating, again calling for Whatley’s ouster.
The calls come as Noem’s Federal Emergency Management Agency remains in a state of flux, operationally and organizationally.
Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer, who, with Sen. Kevin Corbin (R-Macon), co-chairs GROW NC, said that Community Development Block Grant funding seems to be flowing without issues, but that anything going through DHS/FEMA is not.
In November, acting FEMA head David Richardson resigned six months into the job after criticism of the agency’s response to deadly floods in Texas. Trump has discussed abolishing the agency, against the counsel of advisors. Reporting by The Washington Post last month says Noem wants that too, but that members of the FEMA Review Council want the opposite — elevation of FEMA to a cabinet-level agency.
The council, of which Whatley is a member, was established by presidential executive order in January and charged with producing a report on FEMA reform within 180 days of its first public meeting, which was May 20. That deadline has long passed, but no report has been issued.
During the Dec. 15 GROW NC meeting, Kevin Leonard, executive director of the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners, said he felt that both regional and national FEMA leaders had been “tone deaf.” After Leonard voiced his concerns at the previous meeting, he suggested that retaliation ensued.
“It’s like they doubled down on increasing regulations that create increased red tape for reimbursements for the people in our communities, for our local governments,” he said. “That’s going to stifle growth, or stifle recovery growth in North Carolina even further.”
On Dec. 16, the Town of Waynesville announced that after several denials, it had finally been reimbursed by a state program for out-of-pocket expenses related to the reopening of the Depot Street bridge in April — not by FEMA, not by the Federal Highway Administration, but by a state program.
North Carolina’s Attorney General, Jeff Jackson, had to sue FEMA to restore roughly $200 million that the agency yanked from more than 60 infrastructure projects.
Since the storm, there’s been only one bill passed in Congress addressing North Carolina’s $60 billion in damages. It’s expected to bring between $9 billion and $15 billion. Congressman Chuck Edwards (R-Henderson), who represents the most severely impacted portion of the state, sits on the powerful House appropriations committee but has refused to speak to SMN about his inability to satisfy fully the needs of his constituents.
Nevertheless, Calabria believes the most significant thing the state can do on the federal level in 2026 is to secure an additional federal appropriation. Leonard agreed, saying the NCACC is meeting with county managers this week to verify the situation on the ground.
“We’re going to take that information, and we’re going to go back to Washington in the first part of the year and start banging on doors again,” Leonard said. “This has to change.”
A spokesperson for Michael Whatley did not return a message seeking an interview by SMN.
