An expert panel appointed by President Trump recommended on Thursday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency make changes that could speed the flow of disaster aid to communities but also force states to cover more of the costs of more disasters without federal help.
Members of the panel described a disaster agency that they said has gotten too involved in long-term recovery efforts and become political, specifically criticizing its actions to help states during the coronavirus pandemic. Changes they recommended — which they acknowledged would require action by Congress — included significant overhaul of the way FEMA helps state and local governments pay for recovery and provides housing to disaster survivors.
“We need to refocus FEMA to get it back on what its mission originally was,” said Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary. FEMA is part of the Homeland Security Department.
The release of the report could accelerate changes to the disaster agency that state and local emergency officials have been forced to adapt to since Mr. Trump’s second term began last January. The president has said he believes FEMA’s work is too expensive and inefficient, a view that is shared by many emergency managers, and that governors should be able to handle more events on their own.
Since last year, communities have waited longer than ever to learn whether Mr. Trump will approve their requests for federal disaster aid, according to a New York Times analysis. The process through which the federal government reimburses state and local counterparts for disaster response and recovery expenses has always been bureaucratic, but Trump administration efforts to scrutinize that spending has at times created large backlogs of aid owed to states and left communities unsure of what help, if any, they can expect from FEMA.
Many of the report’s proposals would require legislation, though there are some steps the Trump administration could take on its own to reshape FEMA’s role in disasters. A bill with bipartisan support includes proposals similar to the recommendations released Thursday but has been stalled since September.
FEMA’s disaster aid fund distributed $12 billion per year, on average, from 1992 through 2021, but those costs have frequently surpassed $40 billion a year more recently, as disasters have become more frequent and expensive. A developing episode of the climate pattern known as El Niño, forecast to reach potentially extreme strength, could make disasters more numerous and costly over the next year.
The 10 members of the panel, known as the FEMA Review Council, include current and former emergency managers and government executives, largely from disaster-prone states in the South, including Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. All but three are Republicans.
Though Mr. Trump had suggested early in his second term that FEMA should perhaps “go away” altogether, the panel’s members quickly concluded that the agency should be overhauled, but not abolished.
The group had been set to release its recommendations in December, but minutes before it was scheduled to start, that meeting was postponed indefinitely, even appearing to catch Kristi Noem, then the homeland security secretary, by surprise. Twice since then, Mr. Trump issued executive orders to extend the timeline for the group’s work.
Among the panel’s recommendations released Thursday: Replacing the reimbursement process for disaster aid with one that delivers money more quickly and directly. Rather than basing aid totals on time-consuming surveys of actual damage, FEMA would use factors such as hurricane wind speeds or the height of floodwaters to determine how much money a disaster-struck community would be eligible to receive, paying out that amount within 30 days.
The group also recommended that FEMA play a smaller role in housing disaster survivors. It suggested that FEMA give up efforts to help survivors secure long-term housing. And it proposed that FEMA should help house only people whose homes are uninhabitable, and not those whose homes are damaged but not destroyed.
That could mean disaster survivors can’t turn to FEMA for help covering medical costs, funeral expenses or transportation barriers tied to a disaster, said Madison Sloan, director of a disaster recovery and fair housing project at Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit focused on social, economic and racial justice.
“There’s no help for you if your home wasn’t destroyed,” Ms. Sloan said.
FEMA’s assistance “should only be reserved for truly significant events,” said Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management. States should be less reliant on the federal government to pay for and guide their emergency management efforts, he said.
“We have gotten into a position where we are sustaining our programs on federal dollars,” Mr. Guthrie said. “That was never the intent. I know that’s going to ruffle some feathers.”
In a statement, the National Emergency Management Association, an organization representing state and local emergency managers across the country, said it “broadly supports” the review council’s call to make FEMA programs less complex. The nonprofit called for any changes to occur over several years to give state and local governments time to adjust.
The FEMA panel’s 75-page report also called for a private takeover of the National Flood Insurance Program, which guarantees coverage to residents but has become insolvent as claims have skyrocketed and coastal development has increased in recent decades. Some in the insurance industry had lobbied the Trump administration, saying there was appetite for companies to take on more of the flood insurance market.
Some aspects of the group’s vision for FEMA have shifted over the past six months, according to a review by The Times of five drafts of the report.
For example, an earlier draft would have raised a cost threshold that guides the president’s decision about whether FEMA should intervene by 50 percent, making it more difficult for disasters to qualify for federal aid. The final recommendations suggested using inflation to help make those decisions but didn’t specify exactly how much higher the threshold should be.
An initial version of the report dated Oct. 31 had called for making FEMA a Cabinet-level agency whose leader reports directly to the president. That disappeared from the draft as Ms. Noem, who served as co-chair of the FEMA panel with Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, cut the report from 122 pages to 15 pages a day later.
The version that had been set for release in December included a recommendation that FEMA remain within the Homeland Security Department instead. That would ensure “critical resources, budgeting support, and intelligence capabilities, which enables stronger disaster preparedness, faster response, and better recovery capabilities,” the panel wrote.
But the panel made no mention Thursday of whether FEMA should remain part of the department.
One former FEMA official and critic of the Trump administration’s approach to disasters said that leaving the agency within the Homeland Security Department could continue to expose it to political pressures.
“This report ignores the real issue: If we expect FEMA to show up for families after hurricanes, floods and fires, then the Trump administration needs to stop starving the agency of qualified leadership and meaningful funding,” said Rafael Lemaitre, a former public affairs director at FEMA and a member of a coalition called Sabotaging our Safety.
FEMA, which dates to 1979, was moved into the Homeland Security Department when the department was established in 2003, but its place there has been at issue almost as long, based on concerns that go back to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Mismanagement by homeland security officials was found to have contributed to FEMA’s bungled response to that disaster, prompting passage of a law that sought to give the disaster agency a measure of independence while stopping short of making it independent again.
It will be up to Mr. Mullin, the former Republican senator from Oklahoma who was confirmed as homeland security secretary in March, to steer changes to FEMA policy. So far, he has taken steps to reverse actions by Ms. Noem to rein in FEMA, rescinding a rule requiring review of expenses of at least $100,000 and reversing some FEMA employees’ dismissals.
Mr. Trump is said to be planning to nominate Cameron Hamilton, a former Navy SEAL who briefly led FEMA on an acting basis last year, as the agency’s administrator. Though this nomination has not been announced, Mr. Mullin made reference to Mr. Hamilton during Thursday’s meeting, telling Robert Fenton, a FEMA regional administrator and member of the panel, that “Cameron sings your praises.”
It was not clear if the Republican-controlled Congress would take steps to adopt any of the proposals with the midterm elections approaching.
Legislation introduced last July known as the FEMA Act of 2025 has gained the support of a bipartisan group of 69 cosponsors, and in September, a House committee voted 57-3 to advance the bill. But since then it has languished as leaders waited for the review council’s report.
The bill’s lead sponsor, Representative Sam Graves, Republican of Missouri, did not respond to requests for comment.
The panel’s members said any overhaul should be significant. “What we see here is a need to change, and it has to happen and it can’t be trimming around the edges,” said Glenn Youngkin, the former Republican governor of Virginia.
