Nine Years, $14 Billion, Nine Finished Projects:
Washington’s Puerto Rico Grid Failure.
Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, killed an estimated 2,975 people, and knocked out power to the entire island — a blackout that stretched roughly eleven months in the hardest-hit areas, the longest in American history. Washington’s answer was money: over the following decade, Congress and three administrations obligated roughly $14 billion across FEMA, HUD, and the Department of Energy to rebuild the grid. A Government Accountability Office audit publicly released July 2, 2026 tallies what that money has actually built.
The answer is very little. Roughly 25 percent of the money — about $3.5 billion — has actually been disbursed, by GAO’s accounting, leaving some $10.7 billion parked in the federal pipeline. Of 258 large FEMA grid projects, nine were complete as of December 2025. One of 32 planned substation rebuilds is finished. Four hundred of 16,000 miles of vegetation clearing. Nine years after Maria, the island still runs on patches.
This is not a one-party failure, and this page does not pretend otherwise. The documented record runs through the first Trump administration’s OMB and HUD funding holds, the Biden administration’s four years of process gridlock, and the second Trump administration’s DOGE-era FEMA cuts and sign-off bottlenecks — all layered on a public utility, PREPA, now in its ninth year of bankruptcy. The 3.2 million American citizens on the island live with the result.
- $14B — obligated across FEMA, HUD, and DOE for Puerto Rico's grid since Hurricane Maria — $14.3B in Rep. Huffman's framing · Source: GAO-26-107772
- ~25% — the share actually disbursed (~$3.5B), per GAO's blog; El Nuevo Día's analysis frames it as ~21% · Source: GAO WatchBlog; El Nuevo Día
- 9 of 258 — large FEMA grid projects complete as of December 2025 · Source: GAO
- 27 hrs/yr — average outage time per Puerto Rico customer, 2021–24, excluding major events — vs. about 2 hours on the mainland · Source: EIA
- 2051 — the year the grid recovery finishes at the current pace, per RAND's projection · Source: RAND via NOTUS
The audit is GAO-26-107772, issued June 2 and publicly released July 2, 2026 by Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee. Its ledger is short and brutal. FEMA obligated $11.1 billion for grid work over the decade and disbursed $2.7 billion. HUD’s energy-related disaster block grants — $2.9 billion as allocated, by AP’s accounting; $2.3 billion as obligated, per GAO’s own product page — had delivered $589 million as of February 2026. The Department of Energy obligated $937 million (roughly $1 billion in AP’s rounding) and disbursed $255 million, while pulling back some $715 million more that had been designated for rooftop solar.
The project count is worse than the dollar count: nine of 258 large FEMA-funded grid projects complete as of December 2025. GAO’s causes read like a checklist of process failure — environmental and historic-preservation reviews, federal staff turnover, poor coordination among the agencies, and the insolvency of PREPA, the public utility that owns the grid. Huffman, announcing the report, said via AP that the federal government has “broken its promise” to Puerto Rico.
“The people of Puerto Rico have watched billions get appropriated and almost none of it arrive.”
Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), ranking member, House Natural Resources Committee, via NOTUS
In an earlier report — two years before the 2026 audit this page covers — GAO flagged that Puerto Rico's federally funded disaster recovery was still facing significant delays, with most grid reconstruction work yet to begin.
The centerpiece was supposed to be the September 2020 award known as FAASt: $9.4 billion in FEMA Public Assistance funding for the grid, the largest obligation in the program’s history, announced in the final months of the first Trump term. Nearly six years later, most of it is still in the pipeline. Of 32 substation rebuilds FEMA is funding at $482 million, one is finished. Of 24 generation projects worth $1.3 billion, seven. LUMA, the private consortium operating the transmission grid since 2021, estimates vegetation management alone — clearing the trees and brush that routinely take down lines — at $1.2 billion across 16,000 miles of line. About $103 million has been spent, covering roughly 400 miles.
GAO’s explanation for the pace is a bureaucratic layer cake. Nearly every pole and substation triggers environmental and historic-preservation review. The Jones Act limits which ships can carry equipment to the island, and a 2024 excise-tax change added friction on top, per Reason’s reporting on the audit. And the system is so old that replacement parts for much of it are no longer manufactured at all.
“Reverse engineering or long wait times, sometimes up to 2 years.”
GAO, on what obtaining parts for Puerto Rico's obsolete grid equipment requires, via Reason
Start with the administration in office when Maria hit. HUD’s own Inspector General found in April 2021 that the department, then run by Sec. Ben Carson (R), and President Trump (R)’s Office of Management and Budget erected “unprecedented” procedural hurdles on roughly $20 billion in disaster block grants for Puerto Rico — and that OMB refused to make its officials available for OIG interviews. The first major tranches did not move until roughly three years after Congress appropriated them.
President Biden (D) inherited the money in motion and spent four years not moving it much faster. LUMA Energy — a Quanta Services–ATCO joint venture — took over transmission and distribution on June 1, 2021 under then-Gov. Pedro Pierluisi (NPP/D); Hurricane Fiona blacked out the island again in September 2022; and the disbursement share GAO measured barely improved across the term. The administration’s biggest energy move — $365 million in rooftop-solar awards — came in December 2024, weeks before it left office. The December 31, 2024 island-wide blackout came in those same final weeks.
The second Trump administration added its own layer. FEMA lost roughly 20 percent of its permanent staff to DOGE-era workforce cuts, per CNN. Then-DHS Sec. Kristi Noem (R) required her personal sign-off on any grant over $100,000 — a rule AP reported left roughly 30 percent of Puerto Rico’s projects pending. Energy Sec. Chris Wright (R) issued Section 202(c) emergency orders after the April 2025 blackout and redirected $365 million toward grid hardening — while DOE canceled or redirected roughly $1 billion in solar awards, per Grist, after about 6,000 rooftop systems had been installed. President Trump also fired five members of the island’s fiscal oversight board in August 2025; a federal judge reinstated them by restraining order that October.
Underneath all of it sits PREPA, in Title III bankruptcy since July 2017 — nine years, roughly $9 billion in debt, no confirmed restructuring plan. Judge Laura Taylor Swain denied $3.7 billion in bondholder claims on March 16, 2026, and mediation has been extended to October 31, 2026. Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón (NPP/R), sworn in January 2, 2025, has sued LUMA twice, seeking to unwind its contract entirely.
2017–2021 · Trump I (R): HUD OIG found “unprecedented” OMB/HUD hurdles on ~$20B in Puerto Rico disaster block grants; OMB refused OIG interviews; the September 2020 $9.4B FAASt award — FEMA's largest ever — came in the term's final months.
2021–2025 · Biden (D): obligations grew but disbursement barely moved — four years of environmental reviews, staff turnover, and coordination failures per GAO; the $365M solar push landed in the term's last weeks, alongside the Dec. 31, 2024 island-wide blackout.
2025– · Trump II (R): DOGE-era cuts took ~20% of FEMA's permanent staff; then-Sec. Noem's $100K sign-off rule left ~30% of projects pending; DOE pulled ~$1B in solar; the Apr. 16, 2025 blackout hit 1.4M customers.
All nine years · San Juan: PREPA in bankruptcy since July 2017 with ~$9B in debt and no confirmed plan; the grid now run by contractors LUMA and Genera PR under agreements the current governor is suing to unwind.
Strip out the hurricanes and the numbers are still unlike anything on the mainland. EIA data show the average Puerto Rico customer lost power for 27 hours a year from 2021 through 2024, excluding major events — against roughly 2 hours for the average mainland customer — and more than 73 hours in 2024 alone. The island’s SAIFI score, the average number of interruptions a customer experiences in a year, runs about 19. The mainland’s is 1.3.
Then add the events. On December 31, 2024, a 25-year-old underground transmission cable failed and roughly 1.3 million customers spent New Year’s Eve in the dark, per NBC News. On April 16, 2025 — Easter week — a second island-wide blackout in under four months cut power to 1.4 million customers and left more than 400,000 without water, per CBS News; LUMA traced it to vegetation on a transmission line, the same maintenance category where 400 of 16,000 miles have been cleared.
LUMA confirmed an island-wide outage on New Year's Eve after a failure on an underground transmission cable, saying crews were working to restore the roughly 1.3 million customers who lost power.
Posting in Spanish during the April 16 island-wide blackout, González-Colón's account said Acting Governor Verónica Ferraiuoli and energy czar Josué Colón were 'working diligently' on the emergency response as 1.4 million customers sat in the dark — the governor herself was away, and the post named the officials handling it in her place.
Residents pay for this grid as if it worked: about 24.4 cents per kilowatt-hour against a roughly 16.7-cent national residential average — some 46 percent higher, with Reason’s all-sector comparison putting the gap at 31 percent — on a median household income roughly one-third the mainland’s. And the horizon keeps receding: RAND’s assessment, cited in NOTUS’s coverage of the report, projects that at the current pace the recovery finishes in 2051. A child born the night Maria hit would be 34.
GAO closed with five recommendations — three to FEMA, two to DOE — centered on tracking, coordination, and clearer communication of project timelines. DHS and DOE agreed with all five. That is the standard Washington ending: the watchdog recommends, the agencies concur, and the pipeline stays full while everyone waits for the next report.
The nearer-term fights are on the island. Puerto Rico’s Energy Bureau approved $1.78 billion of LUMA’s $3.14 billion fiscal 2026 budget request — a 43 percent cut, per Utility Dive. González-Colón’s suits to cancel the LUMA contract are pending. PREPA’s mediation deadline is October 31, 2026. And congressional Democrats pledged in June 2026 to push FEMA — now under acting administrator Karen Evans — to speed disbursement. GAO’s own blog headline reads as the epitaph for the decade so far.
“Billions of dollars available, but limited progress made.”
GAO WatchBlog, “El Apagón (The Blackout),” July 8, 2026
Three administrations — Trump, Biden, Trump — obligated $14 billion to rebuild the grid Hurricane Maria destroyed, and nine years later roughly a quarter of it has been spent: nine finished projects out of 258, one substation out of 32, 400 miles of cleared line out of 16,000. Each era added its own documented bottleneck — OMB and HUD holds under Trump I per HUD’s Inspector General, four years of review-and-turnover gridlock under Biden, DOGE staffing cuts and a $100,000 personal sign-off rule under Trump II — atop a utility nine years into bankruptcy. The 3.2 million US citizens on the island average 27 hours of outages a year, pay roughly 46 percent more than the mainland for the privilege, and are on a RAND-projected schedule that finishes the recovery in 2051.
