New FEMA Blueprint Shifts More Disaster Recovery Costs, Responsibility to States and Counties
A new federal report released this week calls for a dramatic restructuring of the nation’s disaster response system by significantly shifting more responsibility and untenable fiscal risk onto states and local governments. The 75-page report from the President’s FEMA Review Council argues that disaster response should become “locally executed, state or tribally managed, and federally supported.” That philosophy drives nearly every recommendation in the report, including raising federal disaster thresholds, limiting federal recovery assistance, restructuring…