Florida emergency chief hopes FEMA funding delays in past heading into hurricane season

Source: Politico

05/24/2026 04:00 PM EDT


TALLAHASSEE, Florida — With hurricane season just days away, Florida’s emergency management chief Kevin Guthrie said the state is ready — and he expects the state to receive critical federal recovery funding faster than they have in recent years.

Guthrie, executive director of the state’s Division of Emergency Management, said Florida has the experience and resources to manage the 2026 hurricane season, even after this year’s historic wildfire season left tens of thousands of acres burned. The only thing holding back the state’s recovery from previous storms over the past two years, Guthrie said, has been the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which made changes two years ago that significantly slowed down the process used by states to request billions in federal funding.

Fights in Congress over the federal budget that led FEMA and other parts of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to shut down for several weeks made things even worse. “Nobody in the emergency management arena, Republican or Democrat, ever expected DHS to enact some of the policy regulations that were enacted,” Guthrie said. “That did slow the process down.”

But Guthrie said he believes changes recently enacted by newly appointed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin will relieve the disaster recovery funding bottleneck. Many of those changes had been recommended to DHS by Guthrie and other members of the federal FEMA Review Council. Mullin made the changes shortly after he was confirmed to lead the agency in late March. “We’ve seen more money move in the last six weeks than we saw in the last 16 months,” Guthrie said. “None of us expected these slowdowns.”

Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/24/florida-emergency-hurricane-disaster-guthrie-fema-00933930

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Why not say that 45 wanted to shut FEMA down and convert it for use as an auxiliary to ICE? Why not utter ICE Barbie's name as the delayer of funding and the one who ordered that she personally sign off on any purchases of $100k and above while jet-setting around the country, and planning to order luxury government jets for personal use with an exiled operative?