House panel advances bipartisan bill to rebuild FEMA

Al Drago/Bloomberg

The Federal Emergency Management Agency would be overhauled and streamlined with a series of reforms supported by municipal bond issuer groups under a bill the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee advanced on Wednesday.

The Fixing Emergency Management for Americans Act of 2025 was passed by a 57-3 bipartisan vote during the committee's markup session. The bill would restore FEMA to its independent, cabinet-level agency status that's directly accountable to the president, shift its Public Assistance program from a reimbursement model to a grant model, create project-specific grants and reform permitting to speed up projects.

"FEMA is not working the way it should for our communities," said Committee Chair Rep. Sam Graves, R-Mo., Tuesday during the hearing. Graves, who sponsored the bill with Ranking Member Rick Larsen D-Wash., outlined the bill's "common sense reforms" like a universal application for housing — administered by states — and called it the most significant reform to the agency in decades.

The committee unveiled the bill in June before summer recess.

FEMA's reimbursement program for disaster-struck cities and states is considered a key credit protector, but the agency is frequently criticized for a paperwork-heavy, drawn-out process. Some local governments are still dealing with FEMA reimbursements decades after Hurricane Katrina, said committee members during the hearing. "Nobody trusts FEMA," said Rep. Mike Ezell, R-Miss. "And why should they? More than 20 years after Katrina, many people on the Mississippi Gulf Coast are still battling with FEMA," he said. "This is unacceptable."

The legislation comes as the Trump administration has threatened to abolish the agency. In January, President Trump signed an executive order establishing the Council to Assess the Federal Emergency Management Agency to review and recommend changes to FEMA. It has not yet released its results.

It remains to be seen whether the strong bipartisan support for the committee's FEMA bill survives on the House floor. The bill may go before the full House for a vote in the coming weeks or could be folded into a larger spending bill.

The National Association of Counties is among the local government groups that supports the legislation. In addition to the shift to a public assistance grant model, the bill allows states to develop a list of pre-approved mitigation projects and would create an online public dashboard that would allow local officials to see where the federal money is in the pipeline, said Eryn Hurley, managing director for NACo's government affairs department, during a Washington update call in August.

"We worked extremely closely with the House Transportation and Infrastructure congressional committee members to ensure that key county priorities were actually included in this larger package," Hurley said during the call. "We're very excited about this," she said, adding that NACo is urging its members to ask their Congressional delegates to support the legislation.

The bill also has the support of the National League of Cities, American Public Power Association, American Society of Civil Engineers and National Low Income Housing Coalition.

More than two dozen FEMA staff last month sent a letter to Congress last month criticizing the Trump administration's leadership, warning it could lead to another disaster on the scale of Katrina.