When President Joe Biden left office, a group of state and federal officials was nearly finished with its annual report on how the nation draws its flood maps.
The group, FEMA’s Technical Mapping Advisory Committee, was disbanded in January, when President Donald Trump’s administration took an axe to all advisory committees within the Department of Homeland Security.
The 2024 report was never published.
As Texas looks to build back from the deadly floods that killed more than 130 in July, and Wisconsin declares a state of emergency over flash floods in the Midwest this week, those who work in flood mitigation see a national system already decades behind. Federal flood maps, which indicate areas at high risk of flooding and are used to mandate flood insurance, are often outdated and not designed to provide a detailed reflection of risk.
The Trump administration, these experts say, has sown confusion and slowed progress on recent efforts to modernize the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s mapping program.
The advisory group’s unpublished 2024 report was building upon an aggressive — and contentious — agenda for mapping reform that scientists and government officials deemed necessary to reduce human suffering and mitigate expensive relief efforts. The FEMA advisory group gave states, local communities and floodplain experts a seat at the table as FEMA considered more modern ways to map flood risks and hazards.
“This is a group of seasoned professional people,” said Glenn Heistand, a University of Illinois water resources engineer, who was added to TMAC in 2024 shortly before it was disbanded.
“They don’t have an axe to grind, there’s not a political issue. This is guidance being offered by the practitioners who are actually doing it on the ground in real life, interacting with the public, and dealing with the fallout of complications or unintended consequences.”
“It’s something that floodplain managers follow closely. In the background of every state or municipality that has a flooding problem, someone somewhere is paying attention,” Karl Bursa, the former floodplain manager for Monroe County, Florida, and currently the public works manager for Lake County, Florida, said of TMAC’s reports.
“The 2024 Report has not yet been finalized, and FEMA does not typically release copies of the draft Annual Reports,” said Vince DiCamillo, the chair of the committee before it was disbanded and a senior principal at design consulting firm Stantec. DiCamillo directed NOTUS to the committee’s recommendations in its November 2024 meeting minutes, which he said “will be included in the 2024 Annual report when finalized.” He referred NOTUS to FEMA for further questions about the report’s status.
FEMA did not respond to NOTUS requests for comment.
The advisory council was created by Congress in 2012 to help address critical problems with FEMA’s flood mapping.
“For directing policy at a higher level, there’s not really another way to do that besides TMAC,” Heistand said. Heistand leads a group of engineers responsible for updating FEMA flood maps in Illinois, through a cooperative program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that’s funded by FEMA. “TMAC has authority, in the sense that Congress authorized the committee to be formed. There’s an expectation that TMAC’s feedback carries some weight.”
The 2023 TMAC report, the last one finalized before Biden left office, recommended changes to FEMA’s mapping strategies that the report’s authors warned would be “controversial.”
The report called for abandoning the current criteria that FEMA uses to mandate the purchase of flood insurance. Currently, if a structure has at least a 1% chance of flooding in a year it’s put in the flood zone.
“Status quo underestimates the 1% annual chance flood 50% of the time,” the authors wrote in the report.
Instead, the report’s authors advised the creation of two new flood zones, both of which would cover more area than the one used today. The first flood zone would be used to mandate the purchase of flood insurance based on current conditions, and the second one, which would be even more expansive, would consider future flooding conditions and would determine where flood building regulations must apply.
“We understand that some of these recommendations may be met with controversy, fueling longstanding debates regarding how our Nation manages its shared flood risk and other difficult topics, such as who pays and how much before and after flood disasters strike,” the report’s authors wrote.
The “binary” federal flood system, where a building is either in the zone that requires flood insurance or outside of it, is dated, experts told NOTUS. Since 2019, FEMA, with TMAC’s guidance, has been investigating a new way of mapping with a more graduated determination of risk, based on probabilities of flooding.
Called the Future of Flood Risk Data, the initiative drew focus as a possible solution from the Government Accountability Office in its 2021 report that sharply criticized FEMA’s flood mapping problems.
Aside from a one page fact-sheet from 2020, there is no information currently available about the initiative available on the agency’s website. The most recent information about the Future of Flood Risk Data that NOTUS could find online is a spring 2023 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report, which details a large, complex, interagency effort to “set the stage for an improved understanding of our nation’s flood risk.”
Under Trump, FEMA folded its relatively new Risk Analysis, Planning and Information Directorate into its hazard mitigation program. That directorate was in charge of the overall dissemination of risk analysis information, including some flood risk information. The agency also directed that staff cease work that considers future climate-change-based risks, according to current and former FEMA employees.
It’s not clear what these changes have meant for the Future of Flood Risk Data — a reality that concerned one former TMAC member more than the dissolution of the advisory group.
“At a federal level, those two — TMAC and Future of Flood Risk Data — are two key pieces for making improvements in risk identification and risk communication when it comes to the flood insurance program,” said David Maurstad, who was the senior career executive at the National Flood Insurance Program before he left FEMA in July 2024. “The expertise and the guidance that this group provided will be lost, and I believe that changes that they would have been proposing will be more difficult to achieve without that.”
FEMA has lost at least one-quarter of its staff since the Trump administration took office, and with them a significant amount of institutional knowledge about the flood mapping program and its problems.
“The agency right now is in a period of uncertainty as to what the future looks like, so it’s certainly not an environment where people are going to necessarily be bold. I would guess that things are not moving as aggressively as what we were fortunate to have moving in the last six or seven years,” Maurstad said. “That’s even before you start talking about all of the staff that are gone.”
The Trump administration has also revoked a rule, first created during the Obama administration, that required communities using taxpayer-funded programs to rebuild to a higher standard after disasters to prevent repeated damage from floods.
And under DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, FEMA has been slow to distribute contracting and grant dollars, including for flood mapping projects.
“Not only has the staffing been impacted, but contracting has been impacted. Different contracts have been held up, contracts were being reviewed, contracts canceled, and so that private sector support of the program has also been impacted by the changes,” Maurstad said.
Heistand, for example, still doesn’t have a grant application available for the FEMA mapping that his group does for the state of Illinois — and if they don’t get it soon, the group may be unable to plan the future mapping updates. By this time in a normal year, the applications would be done and the grants would be mostly arranged, he said.
“If we don’t get the grant for this program, our program is potentially at risk of dissolving,” he said.
Correction: This article has been updated to accurately reflect the year of David Maurstad’s departure from the National Flood Insurance Program. He left July 2024.