Eric Sorensen has felt for years that the country could better prepare for extreme weather events. But the deadly July floods in central Texas, which killed more than 100 people, solidified the danger of inaction for the meteorologist-turned-congressman.
The U.S. should learn lessons from disasters past, he decided — and use them to save lives in the future.
The Illinois Democrat — who worked as a television meteorologist for more than 20 years — is now working on legislation to that effect. He’s hoping to introduce a bill this fall that would establish a National Weather Safety Board, an independent, nonpartisan government agency tasked with reviewing the aftermath of U.S. disasters, uncovering any failures in response and making recommendations for the future.
There’s already a model for this kind of agency, he noted. The National Transportation Safety Board was founded in 1967, and it investigates all civil aviation accidents, alongside other major incidents involving other modes of transportation.
“We are making so many advancements with respect for aviation that we don’t have many disasters anymore,” Sorensen said in an interview with POLITICO’s E&E News. “So I want to take what we’ve learned there in that process and say, ‘What could happen if we have a National Weather Safety Board?’”
The legislation is still being written; Sorensen said he’s consulting with contacts at the National Weather Service and working with attorneys to make sure his idea doesn’t conflict with other laws.
He’s also scouting for potential co-sponsors across the aisle. When he eventually unveils the bill, he said, he hopes he’ll have a Republican co-lead on board.
“When you think about the NTSB, it is a nonpartisan entity, it is a nonpolitical entity,” Sorensen said. “And that’s what this needs to be too.”
A long history and a growing urgency
Sorensen is not the first lawmaker to push for the idea. Previous Congresses have considered similar bipartisan bills.
Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) introduced their “Disaster Learning and Lifesaving Act of 2020” in October of that year, calling for a National Disaster Safety Board modeled after the NTSB. Reps. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) and Garret Graves (R-La.) introduced companion legislation at the same time in the House.
The bills were reintroduced in 2021, and the House passed its National Disaster Safety Board legislation in 2022 — though it went on to die in the Senate. Schatz and Cassidy reintroduced their “Disaster Learning and Lifesaving Act” again in 2023, with Porter again leading companion legislation in the House. And again, it didn’t become law.
Even before 2020, disaster specialists had considered the idea of an independent investigative agency.
Craig Fugate, FEMA’s administrator under President Barack Obama, raised the idea in 2019 while criticizing his former agency’s own after-action disaster reports as “works of fiction.” Journalist Andy Revkin has uncovered calls for a disaster review board dating back to 2006.
None of the efforts made it to the finish line. But they’ve had support along the way.
Dozens of organizations and disaster specialists submitted a support letter for a National Disaster Safety Board in 2021 to members of the House of Representatives. Signatories included the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Association of State Floodplain Managers, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and former FEMA directors Fugate and Brock Long.
Some say the need is even greater today, amid upheaval at the federal agencies that forecast and respond to extreme weather events, including FEMA and NOAA.
“The broader questions about the future of FEMA and the federal role in disaster response and all of these other things make understanding all aspects of a disaster even more important,” said Andy Winkler, who manages the Disaster Response Reform Task Force at the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center. “Which is why maybe it is getting a little more attention right now.”
There’s a longstanding history of finger-pointing in the aftermath of U.S. disasters, Fugate said. But disaster response has become more politicized in recent years, and the blame game has intensified. The aftermath of the Texas floods in July underscored the “worst current politics,” he said, “where people are starting to point fingers at other politicians saying, ‘This is your fault.’”
An independent NTSB-style review board would reveal what really went wrong in the wake of deadly disasters, Fugate suggested.
The idea, he said, should be to “get a group outside of the response, outside of the agencies, and not just go in there and find fault everywhere but really get to the question of what happened — and, more importantly, why did it happen?”
Despite widespread support from disaster specialists, the concept may still encounter opposition, Fugate added.
“I don’t know of any federal agency that would welcome an outside standing review of all of their things that they do,” he said. “Plus governors and officials may not be keen on having a federal entity investigating their actions.”
But Winkler, of the Bipartisan Policy Center, said that bipartisan support in recent years makes him “optimistic that something like this has a path forward.”
“We have tons of disasters every year and they have huge economic impacts. They have significant loss of life,” he said. “So there’s a lot that we can do better and prevent in the future if we had something like this.”
