(Just The News)—Ninety-five percent of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency’s funding comes from federal sources.
Speaking before the House Appropriations Committee, Director Randy Padfield acknowledged that this could be a problem in the near future.
Rep. Abigail Salisburg, D-Braddock, asked Padfield what confidence he had that the agency would continue to be funded in subsequent years.
“What’s going to play out in Washington is going to play out in Washington,” said Padfield. “I think every day we have updated information that seems to change regarding situations, so we evaluate that as that comes in, but that is a serious concern for us in the long-term.”
He noted that one of their major funding streams is the Emergency Management Performance Grant, which doesn’t just fund the state agency. It also funds emergency management personnel and programming at the county and municipal level, increasing the risk factor.
“Do you have a contingency plan of where you will find the money to operate if that federal funding were to disappear?” asked Salisbury.
Padfield noted that this is a strength of the agency. In the event that emergency funding is frozen or cut, PEMA would work with the governor’s office to determine how to continue providing vital services to the commonwealth.
Representatives expressed gratitude and called for elaboration on the agency’s responses to specific events in their districts, including the recent aviation disaster in Northeast Philadelphia and the massive factory fire in Abington Township.
The agency also oversees the state’s 911 program, which recently converted to NG911, continues to manage the COVID-19 disaster, and even played a role in responding to the rash of drone sightings earlier this winter.
Two areas that are notably out of its purview and that of every other state agency, noted Rep. Emily Kinkead, D-Bellevue, are landslides and sinkholes. These are especially pronounced regions where coal mines have deteriorated the structural integrity of the land.
Padfield spoke about reduced budget requests for the state’s eight urban search and rescue teams as well as Pennsylvania’s participation in the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, or EMAC. For search and rescue, this was due to one-time expenses of implementing a team in Pittsburgh, while for EMAC, there is a surplus from last year.
Through EMAC, Pennsylvania sends individuals or teams to respond to emergencies in other states, like Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina. Funds used to extend the resources are later compensated by the receiving state. The compact goes both ways in the event of major disasters in Pennsylvania.
As a “resource rich” state, Padfield spoke highly of the program and the opportunities it gives Pennsylvania first responders to gain experience and serve during major disasters.
Unfortunately, the state’s fire response is drawing from much smaller pools. Unlike PEMA, the state Fire Commissioner’s office is funded almost entirely through the commonwealth. It uses those funds to provide grants and support to local volunteer fire departments.
Many such departments have been forced to make hard decisions, including consolidating with other municipalities. Meanwhile, availability of fire trucks and other supplies has become scarce and prohibitively expensive as private equity firms have choked the market according to Rep. Joshua Siegel, D-Allentown.
State Fire Commissioner Thomas Cook said that they’re working to address this problem from a higher level.
“We’re engaging with other state fire marshalls about what’s going on in their states, and I think you’re going to see a tidal wave of pushback officially from governments,” he said.
Perhaps the most pressing issue for firefighters in the state, however, is a lack of new recruits. The demographic crisis that is reaching into every industry creates particular peril for small towns where there simply isn’t anyone left to answer the call.
“For all the good faith efforts that this team up there have made, I get the sense that everything that we’re doing at some level is going to fall a little bit short of the mark,” said Rep. Mark Gillen, R-Reading, “I think we’re in crisis today.”
Cook said the two biggest needs to fix that approach are funding and recruitment. Traditionally, volunteer firefighters also serve their departments in raising funds and handling accounting and administrative tasks. For many struggling to find their footing in a tough economy, working for free is not only unpalatable but financially unsustainable.
“The young people coming into the volunteer fire service don’t want to be us. They want to be different than us. They have different expectations, different desires that don’t necessarily align with the traditional values of the volunteer fire service,” said Cook.
He suggested that funding departments more would make a big impact and said the state’s home-rule structure tends to work against its interests. Funding the work and providing higher level organizational structure could be hugely beneficial. Cook also noted that assisting departments with recruitment and incentivizing volunteers would help.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
