After a presidentially declared disaster, federal recovery funding for California flows through FEMA and HUD. FEMA administers Individual Assistance and Public Assistance. HUD administers the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program, which is awarded directly to the State of California through HCD.
This page traces to recurring California wildfire, storm, and flood events where California households could not locate the state's HUD CDBG-DR grantee website or the current FEMA declaration for their county. The pattern was consistent: households that found the state grantee website early in recovery completed the application faster and with fewer disputes than households that learned about the program after the application window had closed.
During the 2026 reorganization the recovery team found that the state recovery links, the FEMA declaration links, and the assistance matrix were documented on separate pages, and households could not see the full state record. The three were merged into this page, which carries the California grantee website, the Federal Register search, and a live FEMA declarations lookup in one place.
Key public access points for California:
- HCD CDBG-DR page: the California grantee page for the HUD CDBG-DR program.
- Federal Register search: the search that returns every HUD CDBG-DR notice naming California.
- FEMA Disaster Declarations: the federal database that records every California declaration by number, incident type, and incident period.
- FEMA Active Disaster Search: the federal search that lists currently open California disasters.
- HUD Exchange CDBG-DR: the federal program page that lists the California allocation and the published action plan.
- openFEMA: the federal open data portal that publishes FEMA program data, declarations, and assistance records for California.
The method generalizes to any state or disaster because it depends on the public record that each grantee and each federal agency publishes. Any California disaster can be looked up through the search tools on this page, and any new declaration is picked up automatically from the OpenFEMA v2 API.