Project 2025 directs the Trump administration to abandon states, businesses and households struggling after disasters. Their plans to slash aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Small Business Administration (SBA) would leave people to fend for themselves following disasters. Meanwhile, Project 2025 aims to privatize weather forecasting and cut back on FEMA disaster preparedness grants, making it harder than ever for Americans to prepare for catastrophic storms, fires, and earthquakes.
Project 2025 calls on Congress to drastically reduce the amount of aid state and local governments receive after a disaster. Currently, the Stafford Act requires the federal government to cover a minimum of 75 percent of major disaster recovery costs, which can increase to 100 percent based on other factors. Project 2025 suggests changing that to a minimum of 25 percent for “small disasters,” increasing to a maximum of 75 percent for “truly catastrophic disasters.”
“Small disasters” would be a new category for the Stafford Act. Right now, the president can either issue an emergency declaration, which allows for a maximum of $5 million in aid, or a major disaster, which uses the 75 percent minimum cost-share formula established in 1974. According to a report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), a 25 percent rate would be the lowest cost-share in the history of the Stafford Act, which has ranged from a high of 100 percent to a low of 50 percent cost-sharing, with the latter only being in effect from 1966-1970. The CRS report also notes that when FEMA tried to return to a 50 percent cost-sharing rate again under Reagan, a bipartisan coalition passed legislation preventing FEMA from implementing the proposal.
If that weren’t bad enough, Trump is already trying to punish liberal states in times of crisis. Trump has taken aim at California’s environmental and law enforcement policies and is pushing Republicans in Congress to put conditions on federal aid meant to help fight and recover from the January 2025 wildfires. If FEMA is disbanded in favor of state-led disaster response with federal assistance when necessary, Trump and his allies in Congress seem prepared to put conditions on federal aid to liberal states – if they help at all.
Project 2025 also says Trump should phase out the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and privatize it. At first glance this proposal seems to run into affordability concerns – private flood insurance would be more expensive than the NFIP.
Unfortunately, the problem is much bigger than that. Private insurance companies would likely refuse to offer flood insurance for homes across the Southeastern United States. Banks are already fleeing floodplains through a new practice known as “bluelining” or “underwaterwriting.” They simply refuse to mortgage homes in floodplains, and insurance companies are following suit.
New York Times reporting found home insurance deserts from Florida to Iowa. After one Iowa family was dropped by their home insurance provider, they were forced to take a more expensive plan with a staggering $120,000 deductible. Their original insurance company abandoned the state after a string of tornadoes and derechos – inland storms with strong straight-line winds – hit the Hawkeye State.
Those kinds of business decisions are justified. Two Louisiana home insurance agencies were driven to bankruptcy by Hurricane Ida, proving how risky it is for private companies to insure disaster-prone areas.
Losing homeowners insurance can mean losing your home in some situations. Banks typically require you to maintain homeowners insurance as a condition on your mortgage. If your insurance company drops you and you can’t get another plan, the bank may foreclose on your home.
Even if they don’t lose their home directly, property values will plummet due to limited buyers. Most people cannot purchase a home without a mortgage. Even if they can, they are unlikely to buy a home they can’t insure. If it does get destroyed by a flood, they would have to pay for repairs out of pocket.
From there, falling property values can push a local economy into a death spiral. Lower property values leads to lower tax income for the municipal government, which means they have less money for schools and road repairs, leading to even lower property values. There would be no escape – don’t forget, those homes are still impossible to sell. The problem isn’t that they are overvalued; the problem is the threat of flood damage without insurance.
At the same time, Project 2025 wants to curtail America’s ability to prepare for and respond to disasters of all types. The authors say the disaster preparedness grants managed by FEMA “should be terminated.” Those grants help fund programs to assist and equip firefighters, prepare for terrorist attacks, help earthquake-proof cities and develop regional housing and supply chain systems so states can quickly respond to nearby disasters, among others. We need to be improving resilience and bolstering our capacity to respond to disasters, not giving up on those efforts.
On top of everything else, Project 2025 offers three words of advice to the Department of the Interior: “Break up NOAA.”
They want the Trump administration to end the NWS’ free weather forecasting, telling the NWS to limit itself to simply providing data to private companies. While Project 2025’s authors recognize that the National Hurricane Center and National Environmental Satellite Service provide “important public safety and business functions,” they still call on the Trump administration to “review the work” of these agencies to ensure they present their data “neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.”
It is unclear how they expect the NHC to provide public hurricane warnings after ending the NWS’ weather forecasting services, a problem highlighted by an interview from AccuWeather’s Founder and Executive Chairman Joel Myers, describing a moment when his company warned rail companies of a coming tornado.
“We told them that a tornado was heading to a spot. Two trains stopped two miles apart, they watched the tornado go between. Then unfortunately it went into a town that didn’t have our service and a couple dozen people were killed. But the railroad did not lose anything,” Myers said.
Outside Magazine describes this “success” story as “a cautionary tale”: dozens of people died because the local government hadn’t paid for the life-saving warning offered to the trains.
Project 2025 would repeat this scenario on a grand scale. Imagine a world where Hurricane Helene landed on unsuspecting towns and cities, all because the local government couldn’t afford private weather forecasts. Then the surviving residents are left to rebuild by themselves. Their state and local governments don’t have the money to help after falling property values drained their budgets, and the federal government ignores them, repeating Project 2025’s dystopian ideal: “[t]he principles of federalism should be upheld; these indicate that states better understand their unique needs and should bear the costs of their particularized programs.”