Trump-Appointed Council Recommends Improving FEMA By Removing The Federal Government From Roughly One In Three Disasters

WASHINGTON. A council appointed by President Donald Trump to improve the Federal Emergency Management Agency submitted its final report this week, recommending that the agency be improved by involving the federal government in substantially fewer of the nation's disasters.

The report's central proposal would raise the per-capita damage threshold a state must clear before it can request federal help by more than 50 percent, from the current indicator of roughly $1.97 per resident, and would change the way the figure is calculated so that fewer events qualify. Council members noted that had the higher bar been in place from 2012 to 2025, 29 percent of the disasters declared in that period, representing about $1.5 billion in aid, would not have met it. The recommendations would produce an estimated 16 fewer major disaster declarations each year, leaving moderate hurricanes, floods, and wildfires to be absorbed in full by the states and counties where they occur.

Additional recommendations would shrink the National Flood Insurance Program and impose new minimum spending requirements that a state must satisfy out of its own budget before it is permitted to ask Washington for assistance. The council described the overall effect as a return to self-reliance. "For too long, Americans have been able to experience a catastrophe and simply assume the federal government would show up," said one source within the administration, who added that survivors would now enjoy the dignity of financing a larger share of their own recovery.

The report arrives as the 2026 hurricane season opens and follows the administration's earlier dismissal of hundreds of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasters, a step that reduced the number of federal employees available to predict the disasters from which the federal government is now proposing to withdraw. The President has said repeatedly that he would like to wean the country off FEMA and push its responsibilities down to the state level, a goal the council's findings advance without requiring him to abolish the agency outright.

Among its ten recommendations, the council also pledged to make it simpler for disaster survivors to receive money, a commitment it placed alongside the proposals to raise the bar for qualifying, reduce the number of qualifying events, and require states to spend more before qualifying at all. Officials characterized the package as streamlining.

At press time, the administration had clarified that the reforms would in no way diminish the federal disaster response, which it noted would remain fully available to any community whose catastrophe was large enough to still count.