State governments should shoulder more of the cost and responsibility for natural disaster recovery, according to a report released Thursday by the Federal Emergency Management Agency review council.

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

Robert Fenton, regional administrator for FEMA Region 9 and a member of the review council, said the flood insurance program is “financially unstable” and in considerable debt.

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“We came away with a number of recommendations that we want to put forward — primarily that focuses on a shift from a federally managed flood insurance program back to the private sector and allowing the private sector to take on a bigger role within the market,” he said. “And I think that’s going to help because it puts the states, who are statutorily responsible for regulating insurance, back into a critical role.”

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

But there will be some extra work to do on the 5% of NFIP policies he said are categorized as “repetitive loss” and are “responsible for 30% to 40% of the payouts that we do through our flood insurance program.”

“So leveraging our other programs, like our mitigation program,” Fenton said. “How do we buy out those homes and move them out of those risk areas? Or how do we build the infrastructure around them to better protect them and have those not be areas that have repetitive damage?”

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

“The President remains committed to getting resources to communities in need while also working with states to ensure they invest in their own resilience before disaster strikes, making response less urgent and recovery less prolonged,” Jackson added.

Trump has said throughout his second term that he wants to change how the federal government approaches natural disaster management and recovery.

“We want to wean off of FEMA and we want to bring it down to the state level,” Trump said in June. “We’re moving it back to the states so the governors can handle it. That’s why they’re governors. Now, if they can’t handle it, they shouldn’t be governor.”

Feds should be in ‘supporting role’

Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said one of the review council’s main recommendations is “to equip state, local, tribal, territories to lead disaster response with the federal government in a supporting role, not a supplanting role.”

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

Guthrie said during the public meeting where review council members outlined the recommendations in their 75-page report that “federal assistance should only be reserved for truly significant events that exceed state, local, tribal, territorial capacity and capability.”

The federal government, he said, 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 are going to say, ‘I hit a million dollars, I can request the threshold,’ regardless if it’s actually broken the back of that local or state government,” Guthrie said. “They’re going to do it because they can. And again, that’s what we’re talking about. We need to realign that.”

‘Empowering the states’

Former Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant said “nothing can be more important than empowering the states to take on this responsibility,” though he added that individuals need to prepare for natural disasters as well.

“I remember as a child when people had their own fallout shelters in their backyards,” he said. “If they didn’t, they knew where the closest fallout shelter was. We took responsibility for food and water and to be able to respond to those disasters.”

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Fenton said the review council believes FEMA’s post-disaster mitigation program should be turned over to state governments.

“Let the state manage this program by providing them the resources and an architecture that will ensure that priorities are naturally aligned and that some of the complexities of environmental review 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 complex for people whose homes are deemed uninhabitable following a disaster. The federal government should also allow state, local, territorial, or tribal governments to have more of a say on emergency housing.

“Let’s get back to some common-sense, state-managed solutions,” he said.

Another suggestion from the board calls on the administration and lawmakers to better integrate private sector, 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 depend on,” Fenton said. “And so we need to be able to leverage those retailers, those small businesses and we need to give them a way to integrate with these events.”

Congressional action

Many of the recommendations from the review council will need to run through Congress, where work overhauling FEMA began last year.

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

The legislation would create one application for federal natural disaster assistance from FEMA, the Department of Agriculture, Department of Health and Human Services, 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 the needs of their residents following different natural disasters.

House Republican leaders have yet to bring the bipartisan bill to the floor for a vote.

Disaster survivors

On a call organized by disaster relief advocacy group Organizing Resilience, disaster survivors said the council did well at identifying problems with the current infrastructure, but that the recommendations appeared to come up short.

“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,” Maddie Sloan, the director of disaster recovery at the social justice nonprofit Texas Appleseed, said on the call shortly after the report was published.

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FEMA would be unable to act on many of the 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 response.

The changes shifted responsibility from the federal agency to states, tribes, local government and individuals, she said. Thursday’s recommendations would only worsen that problem.

“Survivors absolutely want a more streamlined system, and they need help to get to them faster,” Sloan said. “But these recommendations, particularly around individual assistance, in fact slash the help that’s available to individual survivors.”

One such change, allowing only relief for survivors whose homes are uninhabitable, means that costs related to auto repair or replacement, medical care or funerals cannot be covered, Sloan said.

Shifting responsibility to state and local governments, without any federal guarantee of repayment, would leave more survivors without access to critical funds, Sloan and other panelists said.

Michael McLemore, an organizer in St. Louis and a survivor of the tornado there last year, said the federal response was marked by “abdicating responsibility, playing political games and shifting the burdens of states and … cities.”

It took the agency nearly eight months to even start obligating funds, leaving the city to shoulder the cost in the meantime, McLemore said.

The panel called for passage of the bipartisan FEMA bill, sponsored by Missouri Republican Sam Graves and Washington Democrat Rick Larsen, along with 68 other cosponsors, that would take FEMA out of DHS management and reestablish it as an independent agency.