Federal Disaster Assistance Coordination Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. PETERS. Mr. Speaker, I thank Chairman DeFazio, and thank Congressman Meadows, for working with me to improve the federal government's transparency on disaster assistance spending and the government's efficiency on providing communities with relief funding.

As fires burn across California and hurricanes continue to hit the Southeast, it is clear that disasters are becoming larger, more dangerous and frequent, and significantly more expensive. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), there have been more than 2,400 federally declared disasters since 2000, totaling hundreds of billions of dollars in federal relief aid.

Multiple federal agencies help communities recover from these disasters. However, they do not coordinate when conducting damage assessments, which creates duplicative work across agencies.

That's why I joined Congressman Meadows in introducing the Federal Disaster Assistance Coordination Act. This bill is commonsense: it requires FEMA to create an interagency working group to determine any areas of overlap across agencies when conducting assessments used to administer disaster assistance. It also requires the working group to assess new technologies that may accelerate damage assessments following disasters.

This bill, in coordination with two other disaster assistance bills Mr. Meadows and I introduced together--the DISASTER Act and the Post- Disaster Assistance Online Accountability Act--allow the federal government to efficiently provide communities with disaster relief aid.

I urge my colleagues to pass this legislation today, and I look forward to the Senate acting on all three of our disaster transparency bills.

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