Methodology
Everything here is built from public records — the DHS Budget-in-Brief, the appropriations explanatory statements, and USAspending. Every displayed number re-computes to its source, and every printed subtotal is re-summed and asserted equal to the published figure at build time. If a source lacks a number, it is omitted and flagged — never estimated.
The discipline: base ≠ disaster money
FEMA's budget is dominated by the Disaster Relief Fund (DRF), a Stafford-Act cap adjustment that swings with disaster activity and supplementals and runs many times the size of base discretionary. The single most important honesty of a FEMA monitor is to hold the DRF — and the flood-insurance mandatory/fee account — strictly apart from base discretionary. DHS's own documents do this (the DRF Major Disasters line is subtracted from gross discretionary to reach net discretionary). We mirror it: the two kinds of money are shown in separate blocks and only ever combine inside the explicitly labeled Gross Discretionary and Total Budget Authority rollups, which themselves re-add to the published totals.
Fiscal-column vintages
The topline's three columns come from a single FY2027 President's-Budget vintage: FY2025 (Full-Year CR), FY2026 (Annualized CR), and FY2027 (President's Budget). FY2025 and FY2026 are continuing-resolution levels — not enacted-act actuals — and are labeled as such. FY2026 also appears as a distinct object on the appropriations page: the House explanatory-statement account totals, which are the bill agreement, not the CR annualization. The two FY2026 figures are different objects and are never reconciled into each other.
Data extracts — provenance & validation
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Component live money
USAspending's agency budgetary-resources endpoint is reported at the top tier (the whole Department of Homeland Security) only, so it cannot be split to a component directly. FEMA's live money is therefore built by aggregating awards filtered to the awarding sub-agency “Federal Emergency Management Agency.” Because FEMA's obligations are overwhelmingly grants and direct disaster aid rather than contracts, the award-type breakdown is surfaced explicitly so the contract list is never mistaken for the whole.