Nearly ten months after floodwaters tore through downtown Globe, killing three people and turning more than a thousand loose propane tanks into a citywide hazmat emergency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has closed the book on the city's bid for federal help. On July 15, FEMA denied Arizona's appeal of its own denial — the third and final rejection of a Major Disaster Declaration for the September 2025 floods. There is no further appeal available under the Stafford Act. Globe is on its own.
"While we are deeply disappointed in FEMA's decision, our commitment to Globe has not changed," Mayor Al Gameros said in a statement. "Recovery is not over."
It's a bureaucratic-sounding end to a fight that started loud. Governor Katie Hobbs declared a state of emergency within two days of the storm. FEMA visited Globe twice. The Army Corps of Engineers surveyed the damage. Arizona's congressional delegation sent a bipartisan letter urging approval. None of it moved the needle. FEMA's first denial in December 2025 came, according to Gameros, before the state had even finished its final damage tally, a number that grew from an initial $33 million estimate to nearly $96 million once the full scope of destroyed homes, roads, bridges and sewer lines was counted.
FEMA's letter offered a single line of reasoning: The damage was "not of such severity and magnitude as to be beyond the capabilities of the state and affected local governments."
Without the declaration, Globe loses access to the federal government's 90% cost-share on rebuilding public infrastructure, individual assistance grants for displaced families, and federal buyout options for destroyed homes. What's left is a patchwork: a 75% state reimbursement rate instead of FEMA's 90%, a $10 million state appropriation split between Gila County, Miami and Globe, and Small Business Administration loans — loans, not grants, for businesses and residents who in many cases had no flood insurance to begin with.
Globe's denial landed inside a much bigger pattern. Since President Trump's second term began, FEMA has lost roughly 2,000 employees to layoffs and buyouts, on top of a disaster workforce that the Government Accountability Office had already flagged as understaffed for years. Roughly 8,000 of FEMA's staff work under multi-year CORE contracts that form the backbone of disaster recovery operations; the Department of Homeland Security revoked FEMA's authority to renew those contracts without DHS sign-off, and hundreds of experienced responders have already been let go on that basis alone. A FEMA Review Council draft this year floated cutting the agency's total workforce in half.
Money has followed staff out the door. The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program — the main federal grant source for pre-disaster mitigation projects like the kind Globe would need to prevent the next flood — was canceled in 2025 as "waste." It only came back after Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes and more than a dozen other state attorneys general sued and won a court order forcing FEMA to restore it. The administration has also withheld or clawed back over $885 million from other preparedness programs, including the early-warning systems meant to give communities like Globe more notice next time.
The Review Council has also pushed to raise the damage threshold a state must clear before qualifying for federal aid at all by more than 50% under one proposal. Analysts estimate that change alone would have disqualified 29% of all disasters declared nationally between 2012 and 2025. An internal draft floated an even steeper threshold that could have denied aid to 70% of the disasters declared in 2024. A March 2026 analysis found it is now three times harder for Democratic-led states to get disaster funding approved than it was before. Arizona, led by a Democratic governor, fits that pattern uncomfortably well.
As word of the third denial spread on Facebook recently, the question on local minds wasn't just "what now" but "why not court?" Arizona already has a precedent for it. When FEMA killed the BRIC program outright, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes didn't wait for an appeal process; she sued, and a federal judge agreed the shutdown was unlawful and ordered FEMA to restart it. If litigation worked to save the mitigation money, why not use it to fight the denial itself?
The answer is that it's a much harder case. BRIC was a program shutdown, an administrative action a court could review as arbitrary or contrary to statute. A Major Disaster Declaration denial is different: under the Stafford Act, the decision of whether a disaster "exceeds state and local capacity" sits with the president, and courts have historically given that judgment enormous deference, treating it as closer to a discretionary political decision than an ordinary agency action. Legal challenges to declaration denials — as opposed to challenges over how aid is distributed once granted — have a thin track record of success. That doesn't make a lawsuit pointless; it means any case would likely have to attack the process — arguing FEMA ignored its own evidence, moved the goalposts mid-review, or applied a threshold inconsistently across states — rather than simply arguing the denial was wrong on the merits.
There's also a practical clock problem: Globe has already exhausted its Stafford Act appeals. A lawsuit at this point would need a different legal theory entirely, something like Mayes's BRIC case, built around agency process rather than the underlying disaster judgment, and likely aimed at DHS' and FEMA's broader threshold-setting practices rather than the Globe denial in isolation. It would also take months to years to resolve, while creeks and infrastructure repairs must take place now, and destroyed homes still need rebuilding or to be replaced.
Added to the mix is the sheer volume of climate-driven disasters now filed with FEMA.
According to the Center for American Progress, "FEMA personnel are currently attempting to manage a staggering backlog of more than 300,000 projects across 600 open disaster declarations," not to mention a 76-day DHS shutdown earlier this year that drained the Disaster Relief Fund to emergency levels before a late spending bill replenished it.
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