As Trump mulls his FEMA pick, a political land mine awaits in Florida

Donald Trump owes a lot to his adopted home state of Florida. The state, which is the third-largest in the Electoral College, has delivered him increasingly large majorities in each of the past three elections. Since his victory in November, the president-elect has announced plans to remake the federal government in Florida’s image: His nominees for secretary of state, attorney general, chief of staff, and national security advisor are all from the Sunshine State.

But Florida may also present Trump with one of his thorniest political challenges. He’ll have to oversee the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has spent the past four years bringing down the hammer on Americans who live in disaster-prone regions like Florida’s populous coasts, rolling out a series of insurance hikes and enforcement actions that make it more expensive to live and rebuild in risky areas.

This ongoing effort is a direct threat to the boom of cheap coastal development that has fueled the Sunshine State’s breakneck growth. Florida accounts for a huge share of the nation’s total risk from hurricanes and floods: It has more than $2 trillion in residential property, almost all of which is vulnerable to extreme winds or flooding, and it accounts for more than a third of all policies in the federal government’s public National Flood Insurance Program. FEMA is now raising premiums in that flood insurance program by around 18 percent per year in parts of the state — based on a formula developed during Trump’s first term — and it’s also penalizing Floridians who rebuild their homes in dangerous areas.

In conservative Lee County, which lost more than 5,000 homes to Hurricane Ian in 2022, a backlash has reached a fever pitch. Last spring, FEMA accused the county and several of its cities, including Fort Myers Beach, of disregarding federal rules that require homeowners to elevate their homes when rebuilding after floods, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars per home but lowers the amount that taxpayers will have to pay for future disaster relief in the area. Lee County towns allowed hundreds of homeowners to rebuild at ground level after Ian, according to FEMA, and in response the agency moved to take away their flood insurance discounts, which could raise average insurance costs by hundreds of dollars per year. County leaders accused the federal government of “revenge politics” and threatened to sue.

As Trump takes office, he and his FEMA director will have to choose how to approach these kinds of conflicts, which are brewing in every place where the real estate market is premised on government-subsidized disaster relief. Trump could let the agency stay the course, which would save the federal government money on future disaster relief but place financial burdens on some of his most stalwart supporters. Or he could let Floridians off the hook, forgiving the dangerous redevelopment and siding with Republican state officials who want insurance relief.

The president-elect has tried to politicize the disaster relief process in the past. During his first administration, he diverted FEMA funding to beef up immigration enforcement at the southern border; last month, an outgoing agency official said that he feared Trump would do so again on a larger scale in his second term. Trump also vowed earlier this year to deny wildfire relief money to California unless the drought-prone state delivers more irrigation water to farmers. But Trump’s first administration also tried to fix long-standing issues that were driving the National Flood Insurance Program into insolvency by designing the very premium hikes that now draw so much ire from Florida Republicans. 

As of now, there’s little evidence about his intentions for his second term. The two members of congress who he’s reportedly considered to lead FEMA, Republican Garret Graves of Louisiana and Democrat Jared Moskowitz of Florida (who denies he’s interested in the job), are deeply engaged on disaster relief issues and currently represent constituencies who benefit heavily from subsidized disaster relief and flood insurance. Graves has blasted FEMA’s efforts to raise insurance premiums.

Despite the uncertainty, current FEMA officials say they don’t believe Trump will tamper with the agency’s efforts to stop development in flood-prone areas, if only because those efforts help cut federal spending in the long run.

“I think there’s been a shift in perspective since that last administration on investing in a way that’s built to last,” said Victoria Salinas, FEMA’s current head of resilience. “No taxpayer should want their money going into things that are clearly going to get damaged before their time is up.”

The conflict in Fort Myers Beach was over exactly this issue: Homeowners wanted to rebuild houses primed for future damage, despite federal regulations that prohibited them from doing so without elevating them above potential floodwaters. Local politicians appeared happy to let them do so.

“It’s very political,” said Bill Veach, a former Fort Myers Beach city council member who was in office during Hurricane Ian. “You’ve got people on the council who were elected at a time when people were tired of regulations, and so they kind of made an effort to be softer.”

After the initial spat with Lee County in April, the Biden administration tried to smooth things over, restoring insurance discounts in almost every town in the county. But last month, the agency imposed harsh penalties on Fort Myers Beach, where the risky rebuilding was most egregious, and it has faced a torrent of criticism from Florida officials ever since. 

The political divisions between the state and the feds only got worse in the aftermath of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, when a FEMA relief crew supervisor told her employees not to knock on the doors of homes with Trump lawn signs when distributing information about disaster aid. FEMA chief Deanne Criswell fired the employee and called her actions a “clear violation of FEMA’s core values,” but the incident created a frenzy among conservative politicians in Florida. The state’s attorney general sued the agency over the alleged bias, and Republican congressman Byron Donalds called for the agency to be “completely revamped.” The House of Representatives later called Criswell to testify about the incident. 

Some town residents are hoping the incoming Trump administration will restore Fort Myers Beach’s insurance discount, as well as clean house at the agency.

“I’ve worked with FEMA for about 20 years,” said Fred Mallone, a restaurant owner who also runs an emergency management business, at a Fort Myers Beach town council meeting earlier this week. “They’re all gonna get fired. So, don’t be scared of FEMA.”

FEMA’s problems go well beyond Lee County. The Trump administration also inherits nationwide blowback around attempts to raise flood insurance premiums for the riskiest homes. The shift to a new system of higher premiums for riskier properties, known as Risk Rating 2.0, was planned under the first Trump administration. The administration also sought to end insurance coverage altogether for new homes in flood-prone areas, part of a long-standing campaign by conservatives to wind down government-subsidized flood insurance. The Project 2025 agenda, which Trump disavowed during the presidential campaign and re-avowed after winning election, proposes to end the National Flood Insurance Program altogether.

But the politics of flood insurance have become scrambled since Trump’s first term. When the Biden administration rolled out Risk Rating 2.0, flood insurance rates started to soar in coastal states, rising to more than $10,000 a year for some households. A group of Republican state attorneys general, including those representing Florida and Louisiana, filed suit to block the program.

As costs keep rising and coastal households feel the squeeze, Trump will face pressure from multiple directions. The conservative policymakers behind Project 2025 will pressure him to go even further than Risk Rating 2.0 and wind down federal flood insurance altogether, while coastal politicians in Florida and Louisiana will pressure him to roll back FEMA’s insurance rate hikes, effectively restoring taxpayer-funded subsidies to the program. The latter may align more closely with Trump’s own self-interest: The president’s Mar-a-Lago estate is a customer of the flood insurance program and stands to see its premiums shoot up under the new system. 

But some FEMA experts doubt Trump will chart a drastic course in either direction.

When it comes to flood insurance, the first Trump administration “was sort of just a period of neglect,” said Rebecca Elliott, a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics who has studied the flood insurance program. “Whether you think that was benign neglect or malign neglect, I think is open to interpretation.” Either way, she said, the administration is unlikely to revoke Risk Rating 2.0, which would return FEMA to a system that the agency has admitted was prone to miscalculating insurance costs. 

As for the more radical Project 2025 proposals to wind down subsidized flood coverage altogether, Elliott doubts they will find purchase, even in a very conservative administration. The program’s subsidized coverage helps prop up the value of floodplain homes in places like Florida, and as a result these homes are overvalued by as much as $237 billion, according to one estimate. Winding down the program would likely cause these home values to crater, and it would leave homeowners on their own to deal with flood damages, which now exceed $500 billion in the United States each year.

“I think natural disasters are one of those areas where people kind of lose their free market religion as soon as they need help,” Elliott said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As Trump mulls his FEMA pick, a political land mine awaits in Florida on Dec 20, 2024.