A 12-person council of disaster experts appointed by President Donald Trump is recommending sweeping changes to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). If enacted, the changes would represent the most significant reimagining of disaster preparedness and response policy in the United States in a generation.
The council's report, approved at a public meeting today, is meant to advise President Trump's decisions about the agency, though some changes will likely need Congressional approval.
The changes include making it simpler for disaster survivors to get money, raising the threshold for the federal government to get involved in disaster recovery and shrinking the National Flood Insurance Program. Altogether, the recommendations would put more responsibility on states.
"Many in America do not believe FEMA was doing the job that it was intended to complete," said former Mississippi Governor and FEMA Review Council member Phil Bryant at today's meeting to approve the report.
Many of the council's recommendations are very broad, and it's unclear exactly how they would be implemented.
"The devil is in the details here," says Dominik Lett, who studies FEMA at the Cato Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. that promotes market-based policies. "I think that there's a lot of promising ideas that are being pitched by the review council, a lot of which could reduce disaster costs for the federal government."
Many of the recommendations are similar to those in a bipartisan bill that is currently being considered by Congress. "That bill could be a vehicle to implement some of these changes," says Michael Coen, who served as FEMA Chief of Staff under the Obama and Biden administrations.
Here are three major shifts for FEMA recommended in the report.
Recommendation 1. Raise the threshold for getting federal disaster aid
Under the proposed changes, states would have a harder time qualifying for federal funds after a disaster.
When a major disaster hits, state governors can ask for a federal disaster declaration, the key step for receiving federal aid. Those declarations are made by the president, after getting advice from FEMA.
FEMA determines whether the disaster is more than a state government can handle on its own. The agency uses a formula based on the estimated damage, as well as consideration of the local impacts and other factors. Even if a disaster doesn't pass this threshold, the president can still choose to declare one.
The FEMA Review Council is recommending raising that threshold by more than 50 percent and also changing how it is calculated, which means states would only qualify with higher levels of damage. During Trump's first term, his administration made a similar proposal just before leaving office in 2020. The report finds that if this threshold had already been adjusted, "29 percent of disasters declared between 2012 and 2025 would not have met the indicator, representing $1.5 billion."
"If the federal government raises the threshold for disasters, that means there are fewer scenarios where the federal government is going to spend money. Which will reduce disaster costs and incentivize states to take a more proactive role," Lett says.
That could leave states on the hook for millions of dollars to rebuild roads, schools and other infrastructure after tornadoes, floods and other disasters that do not cause enough widespread damage to meet the new criteria for federal assistance. Such local weather events have devastated rural communities in recent years.
Many state emergency officials warn they lack the capacity and financial resources to prepare for and respond to floods, storms and wildfires that are getting more extreme as the climate warms.
Recommendation 2. Give states more control over federal disaster funds
Rebuilding infrastructure after a disaster is a lengthy process and under the current system, it can take years or even decades for states to be reimbursed by FEMA.
To fix this, the new recommendations include paying states a lump-sum immediately after a disaster strikes, instead of reimbursing them later for disaster costs.
Some states have advocated for such a system, where FEMA provides the funding upfront, cutting down on the administrative reporting that states must do. Disaster experts say those vetting requirements help cut down on misuse of public funding.
To speed up funding, the council is recommending a change which is controversial among disaster experts. The council recommends that federal disaster assistance to local and state governments be determined by the conditions of the disaster itself.
For example, whether a hurricane was a Category 1 storm versus a Category 4 storm, the magnitude of an earthquake or how much rain fell.
Using such information to automatically trigger assistance is called a "parametric" trigger, because it's based on the objective parameters, such as wind speed or temperature, rather than an estimate of the cost of the damage.
When this proposal first became public earlier this year, emergency experts told NPR that it's unclear how FEMA could set triggers that would be fair and would cover every type of disaster and every part of the country. If a state's infrastructure repair projects come in under budget, the council recommends that states use the extra federal money for preparing for future disasters. If the damage costs more to repair than a state gets, the state would have to request more from the president.
"I would think something like that would take years to implement, and there would have to be pilot programs," Coen says.
And disparities between a storm's classification, for example, and the actual damage on the ground could lead to unfair situations, disaster experts warn. Some communities could get just a fraction of the money they need to recover after disasters, or could receive no assistance at all, despite large amounts of damage because the event itself had less severe classification. Poor and rural areas that have historically seen less infrastructure investment could suffer, says Michael Méndez, a former member of FEMA's National Advisory Council and professor at University of California, Irvine.
Recommendation 3: Change how average people interact with FEMA
The council is suggesting two major changes to how FEMA interacts with the millions of people who rely on the agency every year.
One recommendation calls for the agency to make it easier for disaster survivors to apply for help. For example, if your home is destroyed in a wildfire, FEMA often pays for temporary housing. But the process of applying for that help can be onerous, and often requires disaster survivors to spend days filing paperwork.
Similar changes have been in the works at FEMA for years, and the agency took steps under the Biden administration to get money into the hands of disaster survivors more quickly, so they could use it to buy basic items such as baby formula and clothing.
The other major recommendation is to shrink the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which provides the majority of residential flood insurance in the United States. The program has struggled financially since it was created in the 1960s, and in the last few decades it has been on the verge of collapse multiple times.
"There's been needed reform for the flood insurance program for years," says Coen.
Flood damage is skyrocketing in the U.S. because of climate change, which is driving more intense rain, hurricanes and sea level rise, and because the number of people living in flood-prone parts of the country has increased. That has driven up flood insurance prices, making it unaffordable for many people.
The council recommends shifting some flood insurance policies to private insurance companies, and moving faster to map flood risk accurately across the country, so that fewer homes are in harm's way.
These recommendations are late, and it's been a long and bumpy road
The recommendations are similar to those in a draft version of the report NPR obtained earlier this year.
However, the earlier draft called for FEMA's workforce to be cut in half, a recommendation that is not included in the final report. An earlier draft also recommended changing FEMA's name. The final draft makes no such recommendation.
That 89-page draft dates from December, when the FEMA Review Council was originally scheduled to adopt final recommendations. The December meeting was abruptly canceled.
In the intervening months, the President fired the head of the Department of Homeland Security. Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was ousted following scrutiny over her handling of the country's top disaster agency, which she repeatedly said should be eliminated. Under Noem, lawmakers from both parties expressed frustration with long waits for assistance for disaster survivors, and for federal grant money to protect people across the country from floods, fires and storms.
Noem was replaced last month by former Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin, who said during his Senate confirmation hearing that the agency should be restructured, not eliminated. He also committed to nominating a permanent leader for FEMA, which has been overseen by a succession of temporary administrators since President Trump took office. So far, no nominee has been announced.
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