Washington Post [no paywall]: “In its final report, the FEMA Review Council seeks to streamline the agency and recommends shifting leadership of emergency response and recovery to the states. A panel tasked with shaping the future of the Federal Emergency Management Agency voted Thursday to approve a report recommending significant overhauls meant to streamline what it called an inefficient and “bloated” agency — changes that received pushback from disaster survivors and environmental advocacy groups. While disasters are already managed in part at the state and local level, the report from the FEMA Review Council recommends that FEMA shift the leadership of emergency response and recovery to the state level by making changes to some of its most relied-on programs. It also called for doing away with reviews that council members said can often slow disaster response and recovery. While the document does not carry any legal weight, it is meant to guide the Trump administration’s next steps for an agency the president has frequently criticized. President Donald Trump established the FEMA Review Council shortly after taking office again last year, in part to address criticism of the way the federal government responds to natural disasters. The panel, co-chaired by the heads of the Defense and Homeland Security departments with 10 additional members, spent nearly a year researching FEMA’s programs, reviewing thousands of public comments and hosting listening sessions with disaster-stricken communities across the United States. “At the end of the day, we know FEMA is broken and it needs to be fundamentally transformed,” former Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, a member of the council, said Thursday, later adding: “What we see here is a need to change, and it has to happen, and it can’t be trimming around the edges.”

The 75-page final report focuses on ways to streamline, modernize and accelerate disaster aid. It recommends downsizing the agency by “rebalancing” how many people work in regional offices versus at the agency’s D.C. headquarters to “reduce the agency’s bureaucratic bloat.” The report describes several of FEMA’s key programs, such as Individual Assistance and the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, as “overly slow, confusing, and inefficient,” and bogged down by red tape. The council recommends keeping some processes, such as environmental reviews, at the local level, and suggests ways to optimize how disaster funding is doled out by the agency…”