A budget shaped by disasters.

FEMA is a component of DHS, so it has no separate line in OMB's Historical Tables and no long agency-authority series to plot. The honest FEMA arc is the one account that defines its money: the Disaster Relief Fund. Below, the DRF appropriation across fiscal years — each point labeled by its own vintage, never blended — beside the far smaller base discretionary line, and the live obligations arc from USAspending.

DRF FY2027 request

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President's Budget

DRF FY2024 enacted

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first anchored point

Change across the arc

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Obligations FY

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all award types — USAspending

Reading the arc

FEMA's budget is not a smooth line, and the reason is structural: the Disaster Relief Fund is a Stafford-Act cap adjustment that rises and falls with disaster activity and is topped up through supplementals — so the appropriation swings while base discretionary stays comparatively flat. That is exactly why this monitor keeps the DRF strictly apart from base rather than folding both into a single “FEMA budget” number. The series is nominal: without a published FEMA-specific deflator, we do not synthesize one.