The Trump-appointed FEMA panel urges states to take the lead in disaster recovery

WASHINGTON — State governments should shoulder a greater share of the costs and responsibility of recovering from natural disasters, according to a report released Thursday by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Review Board.

The board, appointed by President Donald Trump last year, called on Congress and the administration to make several key changes, including outsourcing the National Flood Insurance Program to the private insurance market.

Robert Fenton, regional administrator for FEMA Region 9 and a member of the review board, said the flood insurance program is “financially unstable” and heavily indebted.

“We have made a number of recommendations that we would like to put forward – primarily around a shift from a government-administered flood insurance program back to the private sector and allowing the private sector to take a larger role in the market,” he said. “And I think that will help because it restores a critical role to the states that are legally responsible for regulating insurance.”

Fenton said the review council recommended that lawmakers create a program to transfer NFIP policies, which he said are a requirement for many homeowners, to the private sector.

However, there will still be work to do on the 5% of NFIP policies that he says are classified as “repeated losses” and “account for 30 to 40% of the payouts we make through our flood insurance program.”

“So we utilize our other programs, such as our mitigation program,” Fenton said. “How do we buy up these homes and move them out of these risky areas? Or how do we build the infrastructure around them to better protect them and make sure that they’re not areas where damage continues to occur?”

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson wrote in a statement that Trump “looks forward to reviewing the FEMA Review Council’s recommendations.”

“The President remains committed to providing resources to communities in need, while working with states to ensure they are investing in their own resilience before a disaster strikes, so that the response is less urgent and recovery is less drawn out,” Jackson added.

Trump has said during his second term that he wants to change the federal government’s approach to natural disaster management and recovery.

“We want to get away from FEMA and move it to the state level,” Trump said in June. “We’re moving this back to the states so the governors can deal with it. That’s why they’re governors. If they can’t handle it, they shouldn’t be governors.”

Feds should play a “supporting role.”

Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said one of the review council’s key recommendations is to “empower states, localities and tribal areas to lead disaster relief efforts, with the federal government playing a supporting rather than surrogate role.”

“We want FEMA to set the standard and then promote the creation of standards and the subsequent adoption of standards at the state, local, tribal and territorial levels,” he said.

Guthrie said during the public meeting where members of the review board laid out its recommendations 75 page report that “Federal assistance should be reserved only for truly significant events that exceed state, local, tribal, and territorial capacity and capability.”

He said the federal government needs to update the methodology it uses to determine when a natural disaster or other major event has overwhelmed a community’s ability to recover.

“Many, many states will say, ‘Once I reach a million dollars, I can apply for the threshold,’ regardless of whether it has actually broken the back of that local or state government,” Guthrie said. “They will do it because they can. And that’s what we’re talking about again. We have to realign it.”

“Strengthening the states”

Former Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant said, “Nothing can be more important than empowering states to assume this responsibility,” but added that individuals also need to prepare for natural disasters.

“I remember when I was a kid when people had their own fallout shelters in their backyards,” he said. “If not, they knew where the nearest fallout shelter was. We took responsibility for food and water and to be able to respond to these disasters.”

Fenton said the review board believes FEMA’s disaster response program should be turned over to state governments.

“Let the state manage this program by giving it the resources and an architecture that ensures that the priorities are naturally aligned and that some of the complex environmental reviews and some of the other reviews are done locally,” he said.

Guthrie said FEMA should also look for ways to speed up federal assistance by making it less elaborate for people whose homes are deemed uninhabitable after a disaster. The federal government should also give state, local, territorial or tribal governments more say in emergency shelters.

“Let’s get back to some sensible, government-managed solutions,” he said.

Another proposal from the panel calls on the administration and lawmakers to better integrate the private sector and faith-based and nonprofit organizations that regularly play a role in natural disaster response and recovery.

“(The) private sector is responsible for so much in disasters and they own so much of the infrastructure or key capabilities that we rely on,” Fenton said. “So we need to be able to leverage these retailers and small businesses and give them a way to integrate into these events.”

Congressional action

Many of the review council’s recommendations must be presented to Congress, which began overhauling FEMA last year.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee voted 57-3 in September approve a bill This would bring several changes to FEMA, including removing it from the Department of Homeland Security and turning the agency into its own Cabinet-level department.

The legislation would create an application for federal natural disaster assistance from FEMA, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Small Business Administration.

It would also give local and state governments more flexibility in deciding what types of emergency shelters best meet the needs of their residents after various natural disasters.

House Republican leaders have yet to deliver bipartisan bill to speak for the vote.

Survivors of the disaster

In a call organized by the disaster relief advocacy group Organizing Resilience, disaster survivors said the council was good at identifying problems with current infrastructure but that the recommendations appeared to be insufficient.

“Our concern for disaster survivors is that some of the recommended changes may not reflect what the council has heard from survivors about their needs,” Maddie Sloan, director of disaster relief at social justice nonprofit Texas Appleseed, said on the conference call shortly after the report was released.

FEMA would not be able to act on many recommendations on its own without congressional approval, Sloan said, while many of the “transformative actions” the agency has taken over the past 18 months have significantly weakened disaster relief.

The changes shift responsibility from federal authority to states, tribes, local governments and individuals, she said. Thursday’s recommendations would only make that problem worse.

“Survivors desperately want a leaner system and need help getting there faster,” Sloan said. “But these recommendations, particularly regarding individual help, actually limit the help available to individual survivors.”

Such a change, which only provides compensation for survivors whose homes are uninhabitable, means costs related to car repairs or replacement, medical care or funerals cannot be covered, Sloan said.

Sloan and other panelists said shifting responsibility to state and local governments without a federal repayment guarantee would leave more survivors unable to access critical funds.

Michael McLemore, an organizer in St. Louis and a survivor of last year’s tornado there, said the federal response was characterized by “abdication of responsibility, playing political games and shifting the burden to states and … cities.”

It took nearly eight months for the agency to even begin providing funds, leaving the city to cover the costs in the meantime, McLemore said.

The panel called for passage of the bipartisan FEMA bill, introduced by Republican Sam Graves of Missouri and Democrat Rick Larsen of Washington and 68 other sponsors, that would remove FEMA from running DHS and restore it as an independent agency.