While the Department of Homeland Security wrestles with many issues and criticisms, pressure is building to reconfigure the Federal Emergency Management Agency it administers.
"We have thousands of open disaster projects dating back to Hurricane Katrina, ballooning disaster costs, a bureaucracy that feels like you need a Ph.D. to navigate, and little common sense," said House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair Sam Graves, R-Mo.
"It should be the nimblest federal agency that we have," said Graves. "Instead, it continues to be swallowed up by the weight of its own red tape regulations and bureaucracy."
The comments came during a T&I hearing on Wednesday that reinforced the committee's views contained in their 2025 bipartisan reform bill.
The act moves the agency away from their current reimbursement system toward a grant system that provides relief funds upfront.
"The act's procurement waiver, which treats counties the same as states for federal contracting purposes, would also remove a significant obstacle to rapid disaster response," said Jefferson Parish President Cynthia Lee Sheng, who represented the National Association of Counties at the hearing.
Both political parties in the House and the White House agree that FEMA needs to be reconfigured.
President Donald Trump has called for the agency to be disbanded and created the Council to Assess the Federal Emergency Management Agency to recommend changes.
The council's recommendations include a parametric grant system that would establish pre-defined event criteria using variables — like wind speed and flood depth — to determine relief levels.
The council also recommends transferring more responsibility for recovery efforts onto states and local municipalities, which NACo opposes.
Municipalities struggling to recover from natural disasters risk a drop in their credit ratings while waiting for relief funds to arrive.
S&P Global Ratings issued a report on Thursday that calls out the council's findings and issues a stark warning about the implications.
"Recommendations made in the report could lead to long-term structural changes to the federal-state funding partnership related to disaster preparedness, risk mitigation, and the federal emergency funding backstop for disaster response and recovery," said S&P.
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FEMA during a Senate hearing fielded
The Senate has so far not responded with a companion FEMA reform bill.
In May, Sens. Peter Welch D-Vt., and Andy Kim D-N.J., who serves as the ranking member of the Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee's subcommittee which oversees FEMA, co-authored a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to "pursue meaningful FEMA reform, including improving the agency's disaster response and recovery timeline."
FEMA leadership has changed often during the Trump administration, with Cameron Hamilton the current nominee for administrator.
Hamilton was originally appointed to the position by Trump, who fired him after five months.
Robert Fenton is serving as the temporary administrator.
