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President Donald Trump says he will approve nearly $18 million in disaster relief for Wisconsin related to the tornado and severe storms that hit the state this summer.

The president made the announcement in a Truth Social post Wednesday. Gov. Tony Evers made a request for a federal disaster declaration in August related to the tornado that ripped through the Fox Valley in late July. 

An EF-3 tornado hit Menasha on July 27, plowing through the city, destroying homes, overturning cars and uprooting trees. The storms also caused damage in Forest, Outagamie, Vilas and Winnebago counties.

Trump’s social media post announcing the money did not reference Evers’ request but did call attention to U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor. In his post, Trump said he “just spoke with Tom Tiffany, who has my Complete and Total Endorsement to be the next Governor of the Great State of Wisconsin.”

Trump said he would be approving $17.9 million for severe storms and tornadoes Wisconsin experienced.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has not yet posted that the disaster declaration had been approved on its website as of Wednesday afternoon.

The federal agency put out a statement later Wednesday evening announcing that federal disaster assistance was available “to supplement recovery efforts in the areas affected by severe storms and tornadoes on July 27, 2026.”

The FEMA statement did not include a dollar amount of aid available. It stated that aid would include grants for temporary housing and home repairs, low-cost loans and other programs to help families and individuals. It also stated that assistance would be available to state, local and tribal governments, along with some nonprofit organizations, in Vilas and Winnebago counties.

In Evers’ request to the president, the damage to residential buildings from the July 27 storms was estimated to be more than $8.2 million while government property suffered another $13.8 million in damage.

A spokesperson for the governor’s office said it did not have any additional information beyond the content of the president’s post. 

In a post responding to the president’s apparent approval of relief, Evers said, “Wisconsinites will believe it when we see it.”

“Clearly, President Trump and Congressman Tiffany are continuing to play politics with emergency aid that’s meant to help communities recover in the wake of disasters like tornadoes and floods,” Evers added. “That’s Complete and Total (Bull****).”

In a statement, Tiffany said securing federal disaster relief is a priority and he had been in “regular contact with the administration.”

“Today, President Trump called to let me know that roughly $18 million in aid for Wisconsin has been approved,” Tiffany stated. “I appreciate the administration responding to Wisconsin’s needs.”

U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Glenbeulah, also issued a statement, thanking Trump for announcing the funding after Wisconsin’s bipartisan congressional delegation advocated for federal support in response to the July storms.

“Local officials, first responders, and community members have worked hard to help their communities recover, and federal assistance can help build on those efforts,” Grothman stated. “I especially want to thank the volunteers who have given their time to help neighbors clean up and begin rebuilding.”

The city of Menasha was the hardest hit community by the tornado. According to the state’s request for federal aid, 663 homes were damaged, including 140 that were unsafe and likely needed to be demolished.

Menasha Mayor Austin Hammond said the city was aware of the president’s announcement, but had received no confirmation from state or federal emergency management officials that the disaster relief had been approved. 

“We’re waiting for additional details,” he said. “Once we’ve received a bit more confirmation from (Wisconsin Emergency Management) and FEMA, then everybody — city staff, other governing agencies — will disseminate that information out as quickly and accurately as possible.””

Hammond said the community’s recovery effort hinges on federal relief coming to the community.

“The support of the federal government is imperative to the road to recovery, which will be long,” he said. “It’s going to be months and years, so that support is imperative.”

Winnebago County Executive Gordon Hintz said the county was “encouraged” by Trump’s announcement, but did not yet have any details on the disaster relief.

“The president’s out there and he’s committing federal resources, and I’m encouraged by that,” he said. “On the other hand, we don’t have the details on exactly what it means, where the dollar figures align with what the reported damages are.”

Trump’s announced nearly $18 million comes in more than $4 million short of the $22 million in damage to private and government property identified in the state’s request for federal aid.

While he’d like more information, Hintz added that he’d rather “have a positive commitment made by the president than nothing.”

“Maybe the administration made the approval and he was excited to get out there, and the information will be forthcoming,” he said. “But this is how President Trump has done most things, and apparently, disaster relief is no different.”

This story was originally published by WPR.

Trump announces nearly $18M in disaster relief for tornado, storm damage in Wisconsin is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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• Wisconsin Watch spoke to three small business owners who put their businesses on hold to serve the community after the July 27 tornado. 
• Destiny Antuna of Fox Valley Meal Prep, Lora Glasel of the Recyclist Bicycle Co. and Shane Rosenow of Rosenow Customs talked about the support they found throughout the Fox Cities. 
• They also shared how they will continue to support relief efforts even as they turn their attention back to their businesses.

For a few weeks, countless donations piled up on Destiny Antuna’s shop floor. 

Stacks of canned food, water bottles, Band-Aids, toilet paper, paper plates, work gloves, dog food and boxes of diapers made it almost impossible to walk through the store. Her business in Kaukauna, Fox Valley Meal Prep, usually sells handmade meal kits. But last month, it became a hub for delivering care packages to neighboring Appleton, Neenah and Menasha. 

Ever since the July 27 tornado that damaged homes and businesses in the Fox Cities, community support has poured in. Classified as an EF3, the tornado caused an estimated $8.2 million in damages to over 2,300 structures. With 84 structures destroyed and 412 majorly damaged, many residents were left without shelter, transportation or basic needs.   

Emersyn Banda, a 20-year-old Menasha resident, described the experience of the tornado as life-altering.

“I remember instantly just crying when I had seen it, because I mean, houses were completely down. All of our trees are down. All of the power lines, people looking lost,” she said. “It looked like a nuke had hit our town. It was just in shambles. Everyone was on the phone trying to contact people.” 

In the chaos, community members’ overwhelming desire to help often came without knowing where to direct their efforts. That’s where small business leaders stepped in, putting their daily operations on hold and organizing large-scale efforts to direct volunteers and donation requests. Now, they’re navigating how to continue helping while keeping their businesses afloat. 

Meeting the needs of tornado victims in real time

Antuna was in Menasha during the tornado, completing renovations on a new location she had planned a grand opening for in the next week. She had to shelter in place during the storm.

“Luckily, we’re kind of tucked into a corner, so there wasn’t any major damage,” Antuna said. “It was just a lot of debris hitting that corner, but renovations were, for the most part, done there Monday while we were there, and we were hoping to do a soft opening that Sunday.” 

About an hour later, she immediately drove home to Kaukauna and made a post on Instagram letting people know she was accepting donations to distribute. A loyal customer in Menasha let Antuna turn his lawn into a hot food station and take requests for donations. 

“It was very shell-shocking to walk around and see some houses be totally fine and some others where it’s just their personal belongings just everywhere,” Antuna said. “Like, I have a little kid, that could have easily been like all of my kids’ toys.” 

Antuna and other business owners started going door to door with wagons, which she said was vital in getting the most up-to-date requests from affected residents. 

“I felt like everybody on the outside, in terms of help, was almost a day or two behind,” she said. “So by the time you would get people water, the next day there’s businesses trying to drop off pallets of water, but everybody already has enough water.” 

Lora Glasel, co-owner of Recyclist Bicycle Co. in Kaukauna, went door to door delivering food with Antuna. She soon realized that fixing up and donating used bikes would be helpful for people whose transportation had been destroyed.

“After the requests started rolling in for either people whose cars or bicycles or their kids’ bicycles were destroyed, we did not have enough bikes to accommodate the need,” Glasel said. “So we put a little bit of a call out to our community, and we’ve gotten a good amount of donations that over the next couple weeks we’ll be able to tune up and safety-check, and subsequently then deliver back to the affected area.” 

She delivered over 70 bikes to residents who needed a reliable way to work or even just to relax after a stressful day. Glasel hopes to turn it into a long-term program to help families in need, regardless of whether they were affected by the tornado. 

“To bring, maybe for some families, just a little semblance of normalcy of just being able to take their family on a bike ride in a time where their life is not normal at all is also pretty impactful,” she said. 

In addition to fulfilling specific donation requests for families, Antuna began using the Kaukauna store as a home base to create general care packages with essential household items and food. She used social media to call out for drivers to fill up their cars with 20-plus bags and drop them off one by one on people’s porches in the hardest-hit areas. 

“I will say, it definitely took over my life for the first week after (the tornado) … I do think the store got kind of neglected for the first week, so now we’re slowly trying to get back to a little bit of normalcy,” she said. 

Antuna, who also runs Bad Batch Fitness in Little Chute, struggled to find a sustainable way to run her businesses long term while coordinating the influx of donations coming in, requests from affected residents and volunteer schedules. 

“Once we started to gather a lot of volunteers and have people reach out, it made it a lot easier to delegate things and be able to give a little bit more focus to the businesses,” she said. “It’s definitely been a hard push and pull because if I could have everything run as normal and also be there, I absolutely would.” 

As Antuna moves into the next phase, Fox Valley Meal Prep is no longer accepting donations other than gift cards for gas and groceries. Her plan for the remainder of the year is to have a “meal match week” every month, donating a meal to families in need for every one purchased in-store.

Contractors volunteer to clear tons of debris, protect houses

Cleaning up the widespread destruction from July’s tornado took a legion of volunteers working tirelessly to clear streets and repair homes. Shane Rosenow, owner of the exterior remodeling company Rosenow Customs in Neenah, became an unofficial leader of the cleanup efforts. 

Rosenow said it all started with a post he made on Facebook with the office phone number and an offer to help with yard cleanup, tarping and assessing damage. 

“My phone just started ringing,” Rosenow said. “I had a band of I want to say 12 to 18 contractors that reached out and said, ‘Hey, let’s help. Let’s do this.’ And it was everything from people in the same trade that I do right now to people with heavy machinery, landscapers (and) home mold remediation people.” 

For the next two weeks, he devoted all of his time to the efforts, sleeping only a few hours each night and putting normal business operations on the back burner. He estimates they protected up to 200 homes by clearing fallen trees and setting up tarps. His team of contractors loaded and dumped over 190 tons of debris. 

“I’ve never seen anything like it before. Pictures don’t even do it justice,” he said. “I get emotional on this because Neenah’s my hometown, and Menasha’s like a sister town to us, and it’s going to take years, years (to rebuild).” 

Restoring the St. Mary Catholic Cemetery sticks out to him as the biggest miracle. He started with a small group on the Friday after the tornado, but soon, a bus drove by with about 50 volunteers from the faith-based group Risen Men. After a few hours of careful work, the cemetery curator came by.

“He goes, ‘You guys, in three hours, have done more work here than five of us in the church have done all week. What made you come here?’” Rosenow said. “And I said, ‘God, you know, he just told us, go.’”  

He also had a colleague create two Facebook groups, one for volunteers and one for donations, so Rosenow wouldn’t have to keep fielding texts and emails himself. That way, people could make a post with what they needed — for example, two or three people to help clean up their yard — and other community members could message them directly to coordinate help. 

“The goal behind that was to kind of divide and conquer and allow us to still go back to work, but still do some good in the community,” Rosenow said. “And it’s worked.”

Progress after such a large disaster isn’t always linear. Rosenow’s efforts were set back by a recent storm that blew the tarps off people’s roofs, meaning some homeowners had to start from scratch. The other contractors also needed to get back to work after the first two weeks, he said.

“Some of these guys, it’s just them,” Rosenow said. “And they’re like, ‘We don’t have any money, and we’re spending hundreds of dollars a day on fuel and maintenance on our vehicles and our equipment.’ So I said, ‘Get back to work. We will regroup.’”  

Even though he’s started being recognized as a local celebrity, he rejects that label and says nothing would be possible without God and the other community members who devoted their time.

“It’s not me. If it wasn’t for the people that stepped up behind me, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now,” Rosenow said.

Fox Cities businesses balance tornado relief with keeping doors open is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Click here to read highlights from the story

• Business owners and individuals have mobilized to provide food, water and supplies to those impacted by Monday’s tornado and to clear fallen trees from the area.  
• Wisconsin Watch spoke to several people about why they volunteered their time and resources. 
• Waverly Beach Bar & Grille distributed 500 box lunches daily through Thursday to help affected community members, who include its own employees.  
• Organizations like Operation BBQ Relief provided food to survivors and first responders to “give them just a couple minutes reprieve from all this.”

A walk around downtown Menasha reveals the heart of devastation after an EF3 tornado surged through parts of Neenah, Appleton and Menasha on Monday at 11:56 a.m., traveling 12 miles. Ceramic roof tiles lie shattered on the sidewalk, trees bend at unnatural angles, downed power lines block streets and roofs are torn from churches and homes. 

Community members are still recovering from losing homes and businesses, and thousands of residents remain without power two days later. But the neighborhoods hit the hardest buzz with activity. Chainsaws roar on every street as volunteers clear trees to reopen roads and protect what’s left of people’s houses. 

Roy Eckberg, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Green Bay, told Wisconsin Watch the tornado developed quickly as two storms merged.

“Typically, most tornadoes, you probably get a few minutes to maybe 10 minutes (of warning), but in this case, the rapid development was something I’ve never seen in northeast Wisconsin,” Eckberg said. “It was that fast. It was shocking.” 

Ben Clemmer, who lives just a mile away from severely damaged businesses including Mandersfield’s Home Bakery and Tony’s Bar, was working from home when the tornado hit. 

“It was pretty crazy looking. You know, there’s that kind of freaky storm glow that people talk about. That was very real … Seeing trees bending basically all the way over to horizontal was kind of incredible,” he said. “The surprising part, I guess, to me, is that there’s any trees left.”

Since he had a generator, Clemmer set up a phone charging station outside his house Tuesday so neighbors could maintain access to critical updates and communication. Downed power lines left the entire city – about 18,000 residents – without electricity, according to the Associated Press. 

He’s one of many community members eager to help disaster survivors. Businesses and individuals have mobilized to provide food, water and supplies and to clear fallen trees.  

Helping hands reach out

Jesse Hieb, of Muskego, drove his truck around the worst-hit parts of Menasha, handing out water and Gatorade bottles from a cooler with James Enderle, outreach pastor for Living Savior Lutheran Church. Hieb has experience with disaster relief, including when a flood hit Muskego last August.

“Pop’s (Pub) down in Muskego is trying to put together supplies from that community,” Hieb said. “They were hit with a flood last year, so they’re just trying to pay it forward. So we’re gonna go down, pick those supplies up, come back up tomorrow, do the same thing. Drive around with ice cold water, trying to just help people get through the day.” 

Local business owners transformed their restaurants into food distribution sites, like Waverly Beach Bar & Grille, which planned to give out box lunches from 1 to 4 p.m. daily through Thursday. 

Even though the restaurant wasn’t hit by the tornado, Operations Director Dion Block said many employees were impacted, and residents began using the space as a temporary shelter while waiting to return to their homes. He ordered 500 box lunches per day from his supplier Monday night and mobilized his staff to hand out meals and water on Tuesday.

“We range from people who just lost something like a fence or a tree that damaged their house to … multiple employees whose families lost their home,” Block said. 

Tornado survivors with no place to stay were bused to Christ the Rock Community Church, which continues to provide overnight shelter. 

Emlyn Thomas of Operation BBQ Relief, a nonprofit disaster relief organization, gave out bratwurst at a tent just outside Christ the Rock. He was serving food at a National Night Out event in Chilton on Monday evening when he heard news of the tornado. He immediately packed the leftovers, drove to the Appleton area and served first responders. 

“Tornadoes usually are very narrow in their focus; it’s a line,” Thomas said. “This was not that narrow. This was pretty wide. I have never seen a firehouse destroyed. Station 41 was leveled. So this is in some ways unprecedented.”

Operation BBQ Relief began in 2011 after an EF5 tornado hit Joplin, Missouri, and now deploys volunteers to disasters across the country to provide barbecue meals to storm victims and first responders. Thomas said his crew will stay outside Christ the Rock until Thursday at minimum. 

“We call it the one hot meal that matters,” Thomas said. “Some of these folks, short of it being you lose a kid, this is the worst day of their life. They’ve lost everything. Your wedding pictures are in somebody’s yard 25 miles away. Every possession you had is gone. We can show up and we can give them just a couple of minutes reprieve from all this.”

Chris Ghobrial, owner of 18 Acres Food Truck, drove up about an hour and a half from Watertown and was giving out smashburgers outside of Christ the Rock on Tuesday. 

“It’s just part of our outreach program to give back to the communities that are in need, especially because we’ve been blessed with what we have and want to reciprocate the blessings,” Ghobrial said. 

‘Learning to cope’

A curfew remains in effect from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. for the village of Fox Crossing and the city of Menasha. A boil water advisory also remains in effect for some Fox Crossing water utility customers. As of Wednesday morning, crews restored electricity to parts of Menasha, but thousands of Outagamie and Winnebago county residents still lacked power.

Two days after the tornado, Clemmer said the community is grappling with the long-term implications of rebuilding. 

“There’s lots to do, and yet sometimes it feels like there’s nothing you can do about it,” Clemmer said.

“We’ve started to transition from the initial shock of the event to now shifting more fully into a recovery mode. It’s just kind of learning to cope, I guess, with the new situation, … what do you have to do to … continue moving forward.” 

Officials are asking nonresidents to avoid traveling to Menasha and not to self-deploy to affected areas. Winnebago County officials are circulating a resource guide with information on cooling and charging sites, food, Wi-Fi centers, shelters, medical equipment and ways to donate. Volunteers can sign up to be officially deployed at Volunteer Fox Cities or in person at 1478 Midway Road.

Miranda Dunlap contributed reporting to this story.

Volunteers mobilize across Fox Cities after tornado is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.