Flood Insurance and Disaster Updates
The nonprofit R Street Institute responded to the recent introduction by House Financial Services Committee Ranking Member Maxine Waters of legislation to forgive the National Flood Insurance Program’s estimated $23 billion in debt to the U.S. Treasury. R Street Senior Fellow R.J. Lehmann writes, “It long has been obvious to anyone paying attention that the NFIP’s so-called ‘debt’ to the federal Treasury amounts to an accounting fiction. The money has all already been spent, the bulk of it more than a decade ago. The program doesn’t generate sufficient revenues even to pay ongoing claims, much less to repay a debt that is several orders of magnitude larger than its annual premiums.
