Congressional leaders on either side of the aisle could reauthorize the nation’s primary flood insurance provider, which lapsed Oct. 1, if they wanted to.
Instead, they are opting to use it as a cudgel to repeatedly hammer their colleagues and score political points.
Democratic and Republican lawmakers have turned the National Flood Insurance Program into a political football, tossing responsibility for its expiration back and forth as the government funding fight drags into its second week.
A handful of Democrats have blamed the NFIP’s expiration on the Republican majority. They note that House leaders have kept the House in recess for most of the past three weeks and not moved to put a standalone reauthorization on the floor for a vote.
Republicans, for their part, have taken to the podium and the airwaves more than a dozen times to blast Democrats for repeatedly voting against their clean government funding bill, which would extend the NFIP for seven weeks.
In response to a question from POLITICO’s E&E News on Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson said the NFIP is one of many unrelated issues that have been caught up in the impasse over federal funding. He said Congress “will [reauthorize] it in due course” if Democrats vote for Republicans’ nonpartisan continuing resolution.
But the Louisiana Republican, who has mentioned the lapse in numerous press conferences and television interviews, also suggested Republican leaders see the bipartisan desire to revive the NFIP as a useful tool to pressure Democrats to vote for the GOP funding bill that they have already blocked five times.
“The work of the House has been done, and we have to get the Senate to reopen the government so that we can come back and handle all of these very important end-of-the-year issues,” Johnson said.
Asked why he would not put a stand-alone NFIP reauthorization on the floor, Johnson said, “We must use every leverage point we have to force the Democrats to [vote for Republicans’ CR], and that’s why we’re handling the schedule the way we are.”
The hundreds of thousands of homeowners who have expiring flood insurance policies under the NFIP are unable to renew them while the authorization is lapsed. The program will not be able to ensure payment of claims if a major flood drains its reserve funds, and experts predict that the ongoing lapse could affect more than 1,000 real estate sales each day.
“This is being politicized,” said Lizzy Ganssle, a national spokesperson for the advocacy group Climate Power. “It is so dangerous to use Americans who are facing extreme weather disasters as political leverage, and this is something that we’ve seen [President] Donald Trump do for a long time.”
Project 2025, the policy framework devised by numerous current members of the Trump administration, called for flood insurance to be privatized and for the Federal Emergency Management Agency — which runs the NFIP — to mainly focus on “large, widespread disasters.”
The administration vowed to eliminate FEMA before later scaling back that aim. It has also frozen or cut funding for disaster resilience, weather forecasting and flood mitigation.
FEMA could not be reached for comment. An email to agency spokespeople received a response stating, “Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this email inbox may not be actively monitored at this time.”
Messaging battles flare up
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) mentioned the NFIP in a floor speech for the first time Tuesday since the shutdown began, listing it among the federal programs that he said Democrats are holding up by blocking Republicans’ bill to reopen the government.
Democrats are “putting households at risk during hurricane season,” Thune said. He added, “The longer Democrats refuse to support a clean funding extension, the worse things will get.”
Johnson said on the first day of the shutdown that Democrats “have stalled the work of FEMA and they have prevented people from renewing or getting new flood insurance programs right now in the middle of this.”
“It is dangerous, it is destructive and it is unconscionable to us that [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer should do this, and could do this, for his personal political reasons,” Johnson said in a press conference.
The office of Schumer, a New York Democrat, did not respond to a request for comment.
Democrats, who are typically outspoken about Republicans’ cuts to climate and disaster programs, have been relatively quiet about FEMA and the NFIP since the shutdown began. Party leaders are keeping their message — and their leverage — tightly focused on health care and curbing the White House’s funding cuts broadly.
They have put forth a government funding bill with an NFIP extension attached to it, but they loaded it up with their own priorities, and Republicans have rejected it five times.
Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) said in a press conference with the League of Conservation Voters that the NFIP lapse “did not have to happen.”
“But it happened,” he said, “because Republicans decided to not negotiate and thought they could steamroll and just get their policy priorities to hurt every American.”
The Republican majority’s “job is to keep government moving, and they totally fumbled the ball here,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), ranking member on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, which has jurisdiction over the NFIP.
Refusal to put bills on floor
Republican leaders have said numerous times that Congress has to fund the government before other priorities can be negotiated, but there is nothing stopping lawmakers from bringing legislation to the floor during a shutdown.
The House could return from recess and put an NFIP reauthorization up for a vote as soon as this week. In the Senate, leaders could do the same. Members ahve already filed a number of NFIP extension and disaster relief bills.
Alternatively, any senator could try to pass the legislation by unanimous consent, but it only takes one senator to shut down that effort.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has blocked past moves to reauthorize the NFIP and recently criticized it again. He referred to it as “the program that ensures all the rich people’s second homes” and said he thinks it is “a terrible program.”
Paul has been the only Senate Republican to vote against both the Republican and Democratic funding bills. On Tuesday, he singlehandedly blocked an attempt by Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) to pass a bill to extend a now-expired cybersecurity law that enjoys bipartisan support.
If the shutdown is prolonged, lawmakers could tee up votes on stand-alone reauthorizations or on narrow continuing resolutions that provide stopgap funding only for specific programs or activities, rather than for the whole government. Congress has passed such bills during past shutdowns, including to fund benefits for veterans, children and families.
Critics of those narrow funding or reauthorization bills argue that they “may reduce the pressure on broader negotiations to end the shutdown,” the Congressional Research Service wrote in a 2018 report.
Warren suggested Tuesday that that pressure is the only thing keeping Republicans from putting an NFIP reauthorization up for a vote, even though Democrats have not requested a vote on a reauthorization either.
“The Republicans are in the majority in Congress,” Warren said. “All they have to do is bring renewal of the flood insurance bill to the floor, and the Democrats are all ready to vote for it.”
