Damage from the 2017 hurricanes caused the longest blackout in U.S. history in Puerto Rico. The island territory now faces the long, costly task of repairing and rebuilding its electricity grid. We found: As of July 2019, federal agencies have not funded grid recovery projects there, in part because FEMA has not provided clear information on what sort of projects are eligible Given local challen...

Use of the $35 billion in federal Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery funds for the 2017 hurricanes has been slow. Over a year after the first funds were appropriated, much of the money remains unspent because grantees in Florida, Puerto Rico, Texas, and the U.S. Virgin Islands are still in planning phases. Also, the Department of Housing and Urban Development doesn't have the rev...

The Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) and states' primary method for communities to demonstrate eligibility when they disagree with HUD's eligibility determination is to allow communities to conduct their own local income surveys to show that they meet the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) income threshold. HUD instructs small communities, known as nonentitlement communiti...

Options for targeting assistance to subsidized policyholders of primary residences who may experience difficulty paying full-risk rates for their National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) policies include means testing assistance based on the income level of policyholders or geographic areas, setting premium caps, and basing assistance on the cost of mitigating the risk of damage to their homes. Cur...

During the Hurricane Sandy Recovery, five federal programs—the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Public Assistance (PA), Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP), the Federal Transit Administration's Public Transportation Emergency Relief Program, the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers'...

GAO has identified various challenges to resilience building—actions to help prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adapt to adverse events including those caused by extreme weather. These include challenges for communities in balancing hazard mitigation investments with economic development goals, challenges for individuals in understanding and acting to limi...

Federal, state, and local officials responsible for implementing grants funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) as well as the external oversight community reported lessons learned regarding both useful practices and challenges to ensuring accountability. Faced with aggressive timelines for distributing billions of dollars, they adopted a number of practices to...

As of August 2012, just 37 of 566 federally recognized tribes (7 percent) were participating in the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), and 3 tribes accounted for more than 70 percent of policies. A number of factors have affected tribes' participation. First, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has not placed a high priority on mapping rural areas, including many Indian lands, for...

The distribution of grant funding per person in poverty in cities was not consistently aligned with overall poverty rates. Most cities, with the exception of those cities with the highest poverty rates, received roughly the same amount of economic development funding per person living in poverty. Further, when we examined how grant funds are distributed to cities based on their unemployment rates,...

Federal efforts to support entrepreneurs are fragmented--including among 52 programs at the Department of Agriculture (USDA), Commerce, and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Small Business Administration (SBA). All overlap with at least one other program in terms of the type of assistance they are authorized to offer, such as financial (grants and loans) and technical (training and couns...