The Trump administration is defending a flood policy imposed by the Biden administration and supported by environmental groups against efforts by Republican-led states to overturn it in court.
The Justice Department under President Donald Trump recently asked a federal judge in Louisiana to dismiss a lawsuit brought by 10 Republican state attorneys general who say the policy has unfairly raised the cost of federal flood insurance.
The policy was launched in 2021 by the Biden administration after decades of offering discounted insurance had led the federal government to understate the flood risk faced by millions of properties covered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency program. The higher insurance rates were hailed by environmentalists as a way to discourage construction in flood-prone areas. Rates are decreasing for roughly 20 percent of the insurance program’s 4.5 million policies.
The rate-raising program was targeted in a 2023 lawsuit by then-Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, a Republican who is now the state’s governor. His successor, Liz Murrill, is now leading the 10-state effort to overturn the program, while the Trump administration has adopted former President Joe Biden’s legal fight to save it.
A 126-page court filing in late July marks the first attempt by Trump’s Justice Department to dismiss the lawsuit. The filing echoes Biden-era arguments to defend the higher rates, while adding that the rates were endorsed in May by the so-called FEMA Review Council, which Trump created to evaluate the disaster agency’s operations.
“This may be one of the first concrete actions we’re seeing as an outcome of the [council] report,” said Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, which supports the new insurance rates. The rates are being imposed through FEMA’s Risk Rating 2.0 program.
The recent court filing by DOJ notes that the review council’s May report recommended that FEMA “continue implementation of Risk Rating 2.0.”
The filing also noted that four of the review panel’s 12 members are from states that joined Louisiana’s lawsuit: former Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R); Florida emergency management chief Kevin Guthrie; Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R); and Texas emergency management chief Nim Kidd. The other plaintiffs are Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina and Virginia.
Berginnis called DOJ’s continued defense of Risk Rating 2.0 “unsurprising” noting that the politics surrounding the flood insurance program “don’t break down along party lines.”
“The president has continued to basically emphasize that the costs to the federal government are too much,” Berginnis said. “It seems to be quite consistent with the president’s stated vision of things.”
Joel Scata, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Thursday that “accurately pricing flood risk is crucial for informing homeowners the danger they may face.”
Risk Rating 2.0 has hit Louisiana particularly hard. State residents account for 400,000 of the program’s 4.5 million insurance policies — more than any other state — and are seeing their premiums rise by hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars.
Louisiana policyholders are concentrated in low- and middle-income areas along the coast. That contrasts with more affluent coastal policyholders in other states. State and local officials in Louisiana say residents cannot afford the higher insurance premiums, leading to a weaker economy as some relocate.
Murrill did not respond to a request for comment about the Trump administration’s opposition to her lawsuit.
The states of other Republicans who have brought the case — including South Carolina, Mississippi and Texas — also are widely affected by higher insurance premiums.
But the landlocked states of Idaho, Montana and North Dakota have only about 14,000 FEMA flood insurance policies combined, or 0.03 percent of the national total, FEMA records show. The federal program provides most of the nation’s flood coverage.
FEMA began working on Risk Rating 2.0 during Trump’s first term. It was scheduled to launch in October 2020, a month before the presidential election, but Trump delayed the start by a year.
In 2024, U.S. District Court Judge Darrel Papillion of the District for Eastern Louisiana declined a Justice Department request to dismiss the lawsuit. Both sides are scheduled to submit briefs in November.
