The House on Wednesday passed a four-month extension of the nation’s indebted flood insurance program after Republican leaders rejected an attempt by Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling to include a handful of reforms.
House Republicans called up the bill under rules requiring a quicker debate and a two-thirds majority vote, and it passed 366-52.
The measure now heads to the Senate, but it may not pass easily. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who wants reforms, said he’ll oppose moving the measure quickly, which will could require extended floor time to finally pass the bill by next week.
Current authorization for the National Flood Insurance Program expires on July 31, so the pressure is on Senate Republicans to accept the extension without reforms.
Congress has talked about passing meaningful reforms to the NFIP, which has fallen into significant debt and received a $16 billion taxpayer bailout in March. But it hasn’t gotten anywhere.
The fight often boils down to lawmakers who represent coastal areas and resist big changes to the outdated NFIP, such as increased privatization and reforms tighter limits for insuring flood-prone areas, that they fear will jeopardize home and business owners in those areas.
The House passed a bill in late 2017 to reauthorize the program with significant reforms, but the Senate hasn’t voted on it and has stalled in its own efforts to author a reform measure.
With the current deadline looming, Hensarling, R-Texas, who is retiring at the end of the year, proposed a bill to extend the program until Nov. 30, the end of the hurricane season. Hensarling included handful of changes authored by a bipartisan team of lawmakers aimed at beginning the process of overhauling the way the federal government manages and funds flood insurance.
The language authored by Reps. Ed Royce, R-Calif., and Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore. required the Federal Emergency Management Agency to get communities that routinely flood to devise plans for mitigating risks, and a provision allowing flood insurance policy holders to purchase enhanced coverage and to pay premiums on a monthly basis. The measure would have also required FEMA to conduct a study on flood insurance participation rates and another study on FEMA’s flood loss buyout program, which allows the government to compensate owners to leave repeatedly flooded properties.
But according to sources close to the negotiations, GOP leaders, specifically Majority Whip Steve Scalise, who represents flood-prone Louisiana, rejected bringing the measure to the floor. According to the source, Scalise said they were not going to whip votes in support of the measure.
Republican leaders instead introduced a “clean” four-month extension with no reforms, even though Hensarling himself backed the Royce-Blumenauer language.
The House-passed measure is the seventh short-term, reform-free extension of the program since June 2017.
“This bill before us has no reforms,” Hensarling said during floor debate on the extension. “This is a program that the taxpayer has subsidized, so far, by $40 billion. Some of the debt has been forgiven, but it runs a billion and a half dollar deficit every single year.”
Republican leaders told the Washington Examiner that they have not resisted reforming the NFIP.
They point out that GOP leaders, including Scalise, voted in favor of the House-passed NFIP reform bill last year.
Instead, they argued Hensarling failed to negotiate a timely deal with the Senate, where the GOP majority needs ten Democrats to pass legislation thanks to the filibuster rule.
Republican leadership aides told the Washington Examiner that last-minute reforms included in a bill to extend the flood insurance program during the height of hurricane season would fall flat in the Senate, leaving the program unauthorized during a critical time.
“Last year, Congressman Scalise worked with Chairman Hensarling to pass a five-year extension with dramatic reforms to make NFIP run more effectively and efficiently for taxpayers and families,” Scalise spokeswoman Lauren Fine told the Washington Examiner.
“With the July 31 expiration fast approaching, and no long-term deal in sight, it’s critical that we give certainty to policyholders with this vote today to allow the Chairman more time to reach a long-term deal with the Senate. Whip Scalise has already offered to the Chairman to convene a cross-section of interested parties in both the House and the Senate when the House returns in September – well in advance of the program’s expiration – so we can pass real reforms that finally encourage a private marketplace for flood insurance.”
According to a Hensarling spokeswoman, however, the reform-minded extension the House GOP leadership rejected already had at least some bipartisan approval in the Senate. The language was included in a provision authored by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, the ranking member on the panel, which oversees flood insurance.
