Trump-appointed panel calls for overhauling how FEMA operates
A panel tasked with shaping the future of the Federal Emergency Management Agency has voted to approve a report recommending significant overhauls meant to streamline what it called an inefficient and “bloated” agency — changes that received pushback from disaster survivors and environmental advocacy groups.
While disasters are already managed in part at the state and local level, the report from the FEMA Review Council recommends that FEMA shift the leadership of emergency response and recovery to the state level by making changes to some of its most relied-on programs. It also called for doing away with reviews that council members said can often slow disaster response and recovery. While the document does not carry any legal weight, it is meant to guide the Trump administration’s next steps for an agency the president has frequently criticized.
President Donald Trump established the FEMA Review Council shortly after taking office again last year, in part to address criticism of the way the federal government responds to natural disasters. The panel, co-chaired by the heads of the Defense and Homeland Security departments with 10 additional members, spent nearly a year researching FEMA’s programs, reviewing thousands of public comments and hosting listening sessions with disaster-stricken communities across the United States.
“At the end of the day, we know FEMA is broken and it needs to be fundamentally transformed,” former Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, a member of the council, said last week, later adding: “What we see here is a need to change, and it has to happen, and it can’t be trimming around the edges.”
The 75-page final report focuses on ways to streamline, modernize and accelerate disaster aid. It recommends downsizing the agency by “rebalancing” how many people work in regional offices versus at the agency’s D.C. headquarters to “reduce the agency’s bureaucratic bloat.”
The report describes several of FEMA’s key programs, such as Individual Assistance and the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, as “overly slow, confusing, and inefficient,” and bogged down by red tape. The council recommends keeping some processes, such as environmental reviews, at the local level, and suggests ways to optimize how disaster funding is doled out by the agency.
In their final version, the council’s members removed some earlier recommendations that had drawn concern from the emergency management community, such as reducing staffing at the agency, which it had called “FEMA 2.0,” by about 50%. The report released Thursday no longer includes that language but maintains that the agency should “conduct a strategic review of requirements to determine appropriate staffing levels.”
Previous drafts also stated that FEMA should remain under the Department of Homeland Security, despite efforts from Republican lawmakers to make it an independent, Cabinet-level agency. The final report no longer includes that suggestion.
Another key element of the report focuses on the way FEMA responds following a disaster, making recommendations to shift more capabilities to states and tribes, including the oversight of federal money for grants.
“Locally executed, state managed and federally supported — that was our North Star,” former Mississippi governor Phil Bryant, another panel member, said during the Thursday panel meeting.
The panel also wants to change the National Flood Insurance Program by pushing it more into the private insurance market and letting state regulators and carriers manage flood insurance policies.
Several environmental groups criticized the panel’s recommendations Thursday as being divorced from the needs of Americans.
“Americans are facing increasingly frequent and severe weather that’s devastating homes, roads and crops, and the FEMA Review Council’s recommendations don’t meet this reality,” Will McDow, an associate vice president at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement. “The proposed changes would leave communities without the necessary funding, information and access to insurance to stay prepared and safe when disasters strike.”
Madison Sloan, director of the Disaster Recovery and Fair Housing Project at the nonprofit group Texas Appleseed, said in a call with reporters Thursday that the council did an excellent job identifying problems that have long been the subject of complaints.
“Our concern for disaster survivors is that some of the recommended changes may not reflect what the council heard from survivors about what they need,” Sloan said.
While some of the recommendations will require congressional approval, Sloan noted that FEMA already made some “transformational” changes over the past year and a half. “Many of those changes have had really negative consequences for disaster survivors and communities recovering from a disaster,” she said.
“Our concerns remain similar to what they have always been — that there is a major shift in responsibility and cost to state, local, tribal and territory governments, with no guarantee that there will be sufficient federal funding to meet those costs, or that states will be able to raise that money themselves.”