NEW: One Year After The July 4 Floods, Most Texas Families Who Asked Trump's FEMA For Help Got Nothing
More than half of applicants were denied or never received a decision, and the warning system Kerr County needed still isn't finished
TEXAS - Nearly one year after terrible floods overwhelmed central Texas, the families who survived are still waiting on the federal government that promised to help them rebuild. A new report from Sabotaging Our Safety (SOS), first reported in the San Antonio Current, documents how the Trump administration failed Texans at every stage: before the flood, during the response, and in the year of recovery since.
Across the ten Texas counties that received federal disaster declarations, 8,631 families applied for FEMA assistance. As of May 2026, only 3,877 were found eligible for anything at all. That 44.9% eligibility rate stands against a rate above 80% for applicants referred for individual assistance after Hurricane Beryl. Texas Appleseed's Maddie Sloan found that a majority of applications were never even evaluated, telling Texas Public Radio that a family's application "sort of disappears into a black box."
“There is a reason we have a federal recovery system: because it’s inefficient to have 50 separate FEMAs,” Texas Appleseed’s Maddie Sloan said to the Current on SOS’s findings. “In many aspects, FEMA is a way in which Americans show up for each other during a disaster, in that we spread risk and we ensure that hopefully everyone gets taken care of — that you’re not left on your own just because of which state you happen to live in.”
Key findings from the analysis:
In Kerr County, 97% of applicants had no flood insurance, 84% had no homeowners insurance.
FEMA approved just $41 million in individual assistance across all ten counties, a fraction of a percent of the $18 to $22 billion in damage and economic loss the floods caused.
The average repair grant was $9,958 for homes applicants reported as destroyed. Three months after the flood, Kerr County raised property taxes 7.89%to cover what FEMA didn't.
Read the full report here.
