The morning after the flood, the volunteers showed up. The streets of Westernport, Md., had been buried in mud. The elementary school had been swamped, as had the firehouse, the town hall, the municipal garage and scores of homes. All of the city employees had lost their personal vehicles. Sewer and water lines were wrecked. Books from the library, also ruined, were scattered in the muck all over town.
With so much destruction from the flooding in May, Westernport, which lies along the Potomac about 120 miles upriver from Washington, D.C., needed government help. So in June, state officials submitted a request for about $16 million to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The response was blunt: denied.
Communities across the country are finding that FEMA has become much less willing to fund disaster repair and recovery under the Trump administration. Assistance has been delayed in some places; in others, aid has come in much smaller amounts than local officials had expected.
Disappointment in government is not a new feeling in Allegany County, where Westernport is. Part of a working-class region in the mountains of western Maryland, the area had long struggled as mills closed, jobs disappeared and poverty spread.
Many residents and local officials say their troubles have drawn little attention in the state capital or from Washington. If anything, some insist, the decisions made in those places, on matters like regulation and environmental policy, have just made things harder.
That discontent is in part why, six months before the flood, the county voted for Donald Trump by a margin of 40 percentage points, in a state that his opponent, Kamala Harris, won overall by nearly 30 points.
“They thought he was going to take care of the little person,” said Bill Kenny, 82, who for decades ran a grocery store in Westernport that his father opened in the 1920s. “Because that’s what he said.”
When FEMA denied the request for help, many in Allegany County assumed that there had been a bureaucratic misunderstanding. The state appealed, and local and state officials compiled a more thorough damage report, detailing a cost estimate — $33.7 million — that was more than a fifth of the county’s annual budget, and far above the statutory threshold to be eligible for federal assistance.
Maryland officials lobbied behind the scenes, emphasizing to their federal counterparts that this was a disaster in Appalachia, a place where President Trump enjoyed deep support.
In October, FEMA responded again, in an even shorter letter: still denied.
“You could have knocked me over with a feather,” Dave Caporale, the president of the Allegany County board of commissioners, said as he sat in his family-run bakery in Cumberland, the county seat.
Allegany County received almost nothing beyond an offer of low-interest loans from the Small Business Administration.
In a statement, FEMA said the agency was required by law to review requests closely and to “consider the unique circumstances of disaster-caused damages as well as state and local capacity.” It continued, “This decision, just like all disaster requests, was based on policy, not politics.”
State and local officials don’t buy that. Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat who has publicly sparred with President Trump over crime in Baltimore and National Guard deployments, noted that the president boasted of sending aid to West Virginia for a similar disaster shortly after FEMA denied Alleghany County’s request.
The Maryland communities affected by the flood may have overwhelmingly supported the president, Mr. Moore said in an interview, but they live in a Democratic-controlled state, so that was that.
“I don’t think there was a distinction,” he said. “I think they just said, ‘It’s Maryland, and therefore the answer is no.’”
The decision on Maryland’s appeal was made on the same day that Mr. Trump approved aid for disasters in Alaska, Nebraska and North Dakota — all states that supported him last year — while denying requests from Vermont and Illinois, states that, like Maryland, voted for his opponent.
The Trump administration has also sought to punish states that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement efforts by denying them disaster mitigation money, a directive that largely targeted Democratic-led states and was blocked in September by a federal judge.
Mr. Trump has made it clear that he would like to shift more of the burden for disaster recovery to the states, and early in his term, floated the idea of disbanding FEMA. Though the administration’s stance has since shifted, FEMA has still significantly reduced the assistance it provides, delaying aid payments to some communities, cutting funds for disaster mitigation and adding hurdles to accessing grants.
Some Republicans in western Maryland said they agreed with the Trump administration’s statements about the role of FEMA, and they insist that the governor should have taken the lead on funding the recovery. But many others said this was never really a technocratic dispute about the most efficient way to pay for disasters. It was politics, pure and simple.
“We’re strictly a victim of ideology,” said Creade Brodie, a Republican county commissioner, lamenting the state of politics generally and, in particular, the acrimony between Mr. Trump and Mr. Moore.
Mr. Brodie bristled at FEMA’s curt rejection, given the county’s strapped finances and the urgency of its needs. “Just ‘no,’” he said. “No facts involved, nothing.”
In its statement, the agency said that it had “worked closely with the state of Maryland to collect and analyze damage information,” and that the data did not support sending federal aid.
As the rebuilding continues in Allegany County, some are reluctant to talk about the FEMA situation. When local officials have addressed it in the news, nasty emails have come in from both sides: from the right, saying they were wrong to blame the Trump administration, and from the left, saying they deserved their predicament for putting their faith in Mr. Trump.
Many prefer to emphasize all of the everyday people who have been coming to the town’s aid. Church groups have been repairing houses and running food banks; donors paid for this year’s Christmas lights in Westernport; and residents have been raising money to repair the library.
Still, fixing the library is estimated to cost well over a million dollars. Repairing county roads and bridges could end up costing around $7 million, Mr. Caporale said at a recent State of the County presentation. Replacing the private bridges that help people navigate the county’s latticework of creeks and streams could run above $10 million. Westernport is still in need of a plow truck. The first floor of the elementary school is unusable.
“We today are the only entity that has truly spent millions,” Jason Bennett, the county administrator, said at the presentation. “No one else has come in to our rescue.”
Maryland has spent about $1.5 million, most of it for individuals and families in the flood area who needed assistance. Mr. Moore said the state would do everything it could to help the county, though he acknowledged that its options were limited because of a nearly $1.5 billion budget deficit.
“I wish I could tell them that we could just snap a finger and solve this,” the governor said. “We’re going to work as closely as possible with them.”
As the winter sets in, so have other urgent concerns. Scores of heating furnaces were lost in the floods; more than 150 homes in Westernport still don’t have them. Older residents with no place to go are living in homes laced with mold. Water lines are in need of repair all over the county.
A lot was broken in the floods, not all of which can be easily fixed.
“It’s absolutely no wonder people have no faith in the government,” Mr. Brodie, the county commissioner, said. “Because I’m one of them.”
Campbell Robertson reports for The Times on Delaware, the District of Columbia, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.
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