National Flood Insurance Program Reauthorization

Floor Speech

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Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, I begin my remarks today by offering my heartfelt sympathy to those in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia who were battered by Hurricane Florence over the past several weeks and who are still feeling the aftermath of that storm. Unfortunately, people in Louisiana know more than a little bit about the damage to life and property that these natural disasters can do.

The road to recovery may be long, but we have your back. That is the message that I want to give to our fellow Americans who were in the path of Hurricane Florence. Don't give up. You are going to want to. Don't. Failure is not falling down. Failure is not getting back up.

Today, I wish to talk a little bit about the National Flood Insurance Program. Weathering a hurricane is difficult enough without the added burden of having to do it without insurance. Our National Flood Insurance Program isn't doing its job if it is so expensive that people can't afford to buy it.

Unfortunately, that is precisely the case for many of our people in North and South Carolina. In spite of a robust economy--4 million new jobs in 20 months and 4.1 percent in gross domestic product growth--and in spite of a booming population in our country, fewer people in the Carolinas can afford to insure their property today than in the year 2013. We should be ashamed of that.

Experts estimate that fewer than 10 percent of the households affected by Hurricane Florence have flood insurance at all. So 90 percent do not. Making matters worse, in North Carolina today there are 3.6 percent fewer NFIP policies in place than there were in 2013. Over that same period of time, North Carolina's population has increased by 620,000 people.

South Carolina tells a similar story. Today, there are 1.2 percent fewer policies than in 2013, despite South Carolina having 350,000 more people. This is the exact same story--the exact same story--that we saw in Texas last year, where 80 percent of homeowners in the eight hardest hit counties had absolutely no flood insurance. That is four out of every five people.

Why don't people have flood insurance? There are a variety of reasons, but because the costs are out of control and middle-class families have little choice but to just roll the dice is the main reason. Why is that? Because Congress keeps playing games, and people don't have faith that the NFIP will be around to pay off. It is also because some people want to get a sound bite more than they want to help ordinary Americans protect one of their most valuable possessions--and, in most cases, their most valuable possession--their home. If those people want to reform the program because they want to save the government money, which is a laudable goal--and some do--they are going about it the wrong way.

The reality is that the National Flood Insurance Program is the only place--the only place--where people can turn to insure their home and their belongings.

Now, 98.5 percent of all NFIP policies are in counties or parishes with a median household income below $100,000. So this argument we often hear that the National Flood Insurance Program is just a subsidy for wealthy people and their beach homes is nonsense. It is nonsense on a stick. And 62 percent of all of the people enrolled in the NFIP program are in counties or parishes with a median household income below the national average of $53,889. Last year, many folks saw the premiums for their homes and businesses increase between 8 and 25 percent.

Floods are the most common and, unfortunately, the most costly natural disaster. If your home takes on water, your homeowner's insurance is not going to help you. Let me say that again. If your home floods and you have homeowner's insurance, you will not be covered. Homeowner's insurance does not cover the cost of a flood. If you don't have insurance, FEMA's disaster dollars aren't going to foot the bill for a full recovery. They aren't.

Even if you are eligible for Federal disaster assistance--for example, a loan or a grant--it will be years before you will see those funds. What are flood victims supposed to do in the meantime? They can't just simply sit on an empty lot and wait. Life goes on.

Hurricane Florence is just one in a long line of storms that have devastated Americans families. I am not just talking about massive hurricanes such as Katrina, Rita, and Sandy. Unnamed floods in the spring and summer of 2016 ravaged 56 of the 64 parishes or counties in my State. In parts of my State in 2016, we had folks who endured 20 inches of rain in 2 days. I don't care if you live on Pikes Peak. If you get 20 inches of rain in 2 days, you are going to flood, even if you are not near a body of water. That is just a fact.

In the wake of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria last year, I thought my colleagues might have seen the light and might have come to the table to discuss a long-term sustainable and reasonable bill to reform the NFIP, but, unfortunately, that couldn't be further from reality.

Congress has not only refused to debate comprehensive National Flood Insurance Program reform, but the program nearly lapsed. Congress has had well over a year to lay out a plan. Yet it still refuses to do so because one or two Members want to hold up progress. Unfortunately, it is ordinary people like the good people of North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, and Texas who are feeling the pain of those politics.

Recovering from a natural disaster is more than just putting up drywall. It is about communities coming back safer, stronger, and better prepared. The NFIP is an indispensable part of that effort to rebuild, but a flood insurance program isn't useful if it is too complicated to understand or if it allows bad actors to take from hard- working families.

We need rules for the flood insurance program that make sense. We need government websites that a normal person can navigate. We need quicker decisions by bureaucrats, and a faster process to get disaster dollars to the people who need them. Most importantly, though, people need to be able to afford the flood insurance.

I understand the National Flood Insurance Program is running a deficit. As you can see, we have had an extraordinary number of storms, and I understand that it needs to be put back into sound, fiscal shape. But raising the price of the product so high so that people can't afford the insurance is not going to achieve that. It is going to undermine the entire purpose of the flood insurance program.

I suggest that what we have to do is to strike a balance between fiscal stability and longevity of the program and affordability for the people who are supposed to be served by it. We have no choice but to get the program fiscally stable, but also we have no choice but to get premiums under control, and reform is the only path forward. The status quo is not working.

When Congress established the NFIP, we made a promise. We promised 5 million Americans--that is how many policyholders we have--including half a million people in my State and 350,000 people in North and South Carolina, that we would be there to help should disaster strike, and it is high time that the Congress show people that we meant it.

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