Federal Emergency Management Agency, February 20, 2026 (Photo: Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — State governments should shoulder a greater share of the costs and responsibility for disaster recovery, according to a report released Thursday by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s review board.
The board, created last year by President Donald Trump, has called on Congress and the administration to make several significant changes, including moving 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 burdened with significant debt.
“We have come up with a number of recommendations that we want to make – primarily focused on transitioning the federally managed flood insurance program back to the private sector and allowing the private sector to take a greater role in the market,” he said. “I think it will help because it returns a key role to the states, which are statutorily responsible for regulating insurance.”
Fenton said the review board recommended that lawmakers create a program to transfer NFIP rules, which he said are a requirement for many homeowners, to the private sector.
However, additional work will need to be done for the 5% of NFIP policies that he says fall into the “recurring loss” category and “account for 30-40% of the payouts made under our flood insurance program.”
“So we leverage our other programs, like our mitigation program,” Fenton said. “How do we buy up these homes and move them out of risk areas? Or how do we build infrastructure around them to better protect them and make them less of a repeat damage area?”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement that Trump “looks forward to reviewing the recommendations presented by the FEMA Review Board.”
“The President remains committed to providing resources to communities in need while working with states to ensure they invest in their own resilience before a disaster strikes, making the response less urgent and the recovery faster,” Jackson added.
Trump has he spoke throughout his second term that he wants to change the way the federal government approaches disaster management and recovery.
“We want to wean ourselves off FEMA and bring it down to the state level,” Trump said in June. “We’re taking it back to the states so the governors can deal with it. That’s why they’re governors. Now, if they can’t deal with it, they shouldn’t be governors.”
The Fed should play a ‘supporting role’
Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said one of the review board’s main recommendations is to “equip state, local, tribal territories to lead disaster response, with the federal government in a supporting role, not a replacement.”
“We want FEMA to set standards and then encourage the creation of standards and then adoption at the state, local, tribal and territorial levels,” he said.
Guthrie said during a public meeting where review board members presented their recommendations 75-page report that “federal assistance should be reserved only for truly significant events that exceed state, local, tribal, and territorial resources and resources.”
The federal government, it said, needs to update the methodology it uses to determine when a natural disaster or other major event has exceeded a community’s ability to rebuild.
“Many, many states will say, ‘I’ve reached a million dollars, I can claim over the threshold,’ regardless of whether that would actually break the back of the local or state government,” Guthrie said. “They will do it because they can. And we are talking about it again. We have to change it.”
“Empowering states”
Former Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant said that “there is nothing more important than allowing states to take on this responsibility,” but added that citizens also need to prepare for natural disasters.
“I remember as a child, people had their own fallout shelters in their backyards,” he said. “If they didn’t, they knew where the nearest fallout shelter was. We took responsibility for food and water and the ability to respond to these disasters.”
Fenton said the review board believes FEMA’s disaster mitigation program should be transferred to state governments.
“Let the state manage this program, providing it with resources and an architecture that will ensure that priorities are naturally aligned and that some of the intricacies of the environmental review and some of the other reviews are handled locally,” he said.
Guthrie said FEMA should also look for ways to speed up federal aid, making it easier to provide it to people whose homes have been deemed uninhabitable by a natural disaster. The federal government should also allow state, local, territorial or tribal governments to have more influence over the issue of emergency housing.
“Let’s get back to common-sense state-managed solutions,” he said.
Another board suggestion calls on the administration and lawmakers to better integrate the private sector, faith-based organizations and nonprofits that regularly play a role in disaster response and recovery.
“The private sector is responsible for many disasters and owns much of the infrastructure or critical capabilities on which we depend,” Fenton said. “So we need to be able to leverage these retailers, these small businesses, and we need to ensure that they can be integrated into these events.”
Congress action
Many of the review board’s recommendations will have to go through Congress, where work to overhaul FEMA began last year.
In September, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee voted 57-3 approve the bill it would make several changes to FEMA, including removing it from the Department of Homeland Security and making the agency its own cabinet-level department.
The legislation would create a single application for federal 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 which types of emergency housing best meet residents’ needs in the event of various disasters.
House Republican leaders haven’t prepared yet bipartisan bill to the hall to vote.
Survivors of the disaster
In a telephone interview organized by disaster relief group Organizing Resilience, disaster survivors said the council did a good job of identifying problems with current infrastructure, but the recommendations seemed inadequate.
“Our concern for survivors is that some of the recommended changes may not reflect what the board has heard from survivors about what they need,” Maddie Sloan, director of disaster recovery at the social justice nonprofit Texas Appleseed, said on a call shortly after the report was released.
Sloan said FEMA would not be able to implement many of the recommendations on its own without congressional approval, and that many of the “transformational actions” the agency has taken over the past 18 months have significantly weakened its disaster response.
The changes shifted responsibility from the federal agency to states, tribes, local governments and individuals, she added. Thursday’s recommendations would only make the problem worse.
“Survivors definitely want a streamlined system and need help to get to them faster,” Sloan said. “But these recommendations, especially regarding individual assistance, actually limit the assistance available to individual survivors.”
One such change, only allowing assistance for survivors whose homes are uninhabitable, means costs related to car repair or replacement, medical care or funerals cannot be covered, Sloan said.
Sloan and other panelists said shifting responsibility to state and local governments without any federal guarantee of repayment would leave more survivors without access to crucial funds.
Michael McLemore, an organizer from St. Louis, a survivor of last year’s tornado, said the federal response was characterized by “abdication of responsibility, playing political games and passing the burden on to states and … cities.”
It took the agency almost eight months to even begin committing the funds, and in the meantime the city covered the costs, McLemore said.
The panel called for passage of the bipartisan FEMA Act, sponsored by Missouri Republican Sam Graves and Washington Democrat Rick Larsen, along with 68 other co-sponsors, that would take FEMA out of DHS management and restore it as an independent agency.
