Exactly 2 years ago today, Vermont was struck with devastating floods. Those floods occurred not only a year ago today, but 2 years ago today. We had back-to-back floods in 2023 and 2024, doing about a billion dollars’ worth of damage.
And by the end of last year, every county in Vermont, all 14 counties, were hit by flooding. That billion dollars in damages affected homes; it affected businesses; it affected farms.
Our experience in Vermont with FEMA is that it is absolutely essential and actually quite helpful in the immediate aftermath of the weather event. FEMA can preposition resources. It has the capacity to surge resources and personnel, including people with real experience, and can coordinate with the local response, which is always very intense, from State resources and also from incredible outpouring of help from volunteers.
But acknowledging the importance of FEMA in the immediate aftermath of a wild weather event in any of our States cannot disregard the fact that we need to reform FEMA. We need significant reform in FEMA. In the aftermath of the floods of 2023 and 2024, I visited all of our communities that were affected, and I followed up after that to talk to our local officials, our local volunteers, our local regional planning commissions: What worked and what didn’t in the long-term response?
And what I heard from officials—regardless of what their political orientation was but local officials who had a real sense of urgency about getting the community back on its feet—was that FEMA was too slow; it was too bureaucratic; it was conflicting in the advice and information that it gave. And the ability to respond quickly and timely was really inhibited because of the centralization of the decision-making authority in FEMA in Washington or in one of the regional locations where FEMA has administrative structures.
So the aftermath of repairing, getting the community back on its feet—that is where FEMA has failed us. It is because of the centralization, in my view—in the view of the local officials who have ongoing responsibility to get the community back on its feet. They just couldn’t get answers.
So as a result of my discussions with the communities that have been affected in Vermont, today, I have introduced a bill that is called the Disaster Assistance Improvement and Decentralization, AID, Act. Quite simply, what this bill does is it recognizes that if you are going to get as quick a recovery as possible, as efficient a recovery as possible, as cost-effective a recovery as possible, you actually have to delegate responsibility and authority to the local community that has to live with the consequences of the damage that has been done. There has to be a partnership. There has to be accountability.
But where FEMA’s role is going to be better on this is on oversight to make sure that there is the proper use of taxpayer, FEMA-authorized money. But it is not going to micromanage local folks to death in the name of oversight; it is going to empower the local folks to make those decisions that have to be made right now about getting that community back on its feet.
Every single one of us is horrified when the people we represent suffer the result of a wild and catastrophic weather event. The loss of life is horrifying. The destruction to the well-being of the community is inconsolable. But we can help by making that long-term recovery process work better, and the only way it is really going to work better is by having much more authority in local hands—the decisions that they can make about the culvert, about the bridge, about the grade of gravel that goes into the repairs.
So my hope is that we can come together as a Congress to fix FEMA so that its capacity to help our communities when they have been hurt so hard through no fault of their own—that they will be able to get the capacity to make decisions, act, and get their community back on its feet.
Now, I do oppose this discussion that we are had hearing to some extent from President Trump and Secretary Noem about abolishing FEMA. You know, we can abolish FEMA when we can get an Executive order abolishing and banning wild weather events, but that day is not going to come. But another storm in one of our communities inevitably will come.
What I want us to do, for your State and mine, is to have a FEMA that can be on hand, prepositioned, and help in the immediate aftermath and then be a partner but where we put the decision making and the capacity to act and the flexibility that is necessary for the wise recovery of our communities in the hands of our local officials. I think this will make a much better recovery process for the folks all of us represent in the great United States of America.
