A Trump administration panel that reviewed the Federal Emergency Management Agency called on Thursday for a major shift of disaster responsibility to state and local governments, the FEMA Review Council said in its final report.
The report recommends making it harder for states to qualify for federal aid, consolidating federal assistance for individuals into a single payment program and emphasizing that state and local authorities should lead response and recovery, the council said. The council added that several proposed changes would require congressional action.
The report said the public’s instinct during a national disaster to “rely on or expect the federal government to complete a whole-of-government national response” is a “misconception.” It called for a national standard for state disaster response and for transforming FEMA to “reinvigorate a national system to ensure” state, local, private and nonprofit entities can work together.
To hold states more accountable, the council recommended raising the threshold for states to receive federal funding, saying the current process “does not adequately account” for local governments’ ability to respond and “disincentivizes” local preparedness. The report also criticized FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program as “hampered by administrative burdens that delay funding distribution until well after rebuilding begins,” and proposed a state-led system with nationally set project priorities and local environmental reviews. It said temporary emergency shelters should be the responsibility of states to address a “confusing” and “inefficient” individual assistance program.
Former Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, a council member, told Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin in a meeting Thursday that the top priority must be to “return leadership of emergency response and recovery to the states and to the tribes and to the territories.” Michael Coen, a former FEMA chief of staff in the Biden administration, said in a statement to NOTUS that the recommendations “can’t fully be implemented without legislative statutory changes” and urged collaboration between the executive branch and Congress. The report was released after months of delay; a meeting to release it was initially expected in December but was canceled, and disaster advocates had expressed skepticism, with the group Sabotaging Our Safety giving FEMA failing grades in a report card ahead of the meeting.
Jon Ross Myers is the executive editor and publisher of the Mississippi News Network, Mississippi's largest digital only media company. He can be reached at editor@tippahnews.com
