Flooding by Design: A Look at the National Flood Insurance Program

Abstract

This article examines the financially troubled National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) within the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), in order to understand how a program designed to reduce the risk exposure of US citizens to flooding disasters has ultimately resulted in incentivizing the settlement of the country's floodplains in the past few decades. The origin of the program and its implementation history are discussed to show how Congress has repeatedly amended the program as natural disasters have exposed flaws in program's design and implementation, with little success as the cost of flooding disasters in the US continues to rise. The heavy flood losses from the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season were almost fatal to the program, leading to concerns regarding its continued solvency and viability. Eggers and O'Leary's systems perspective framework is used to analyze the program to understand how it reached this point. Critiquing the program through the theoretical arguments of another federally designed, locally implemented government project, the Economic Development Agency's Oakland Project, as considered in Pressman and Wildavsky's classic implementation text, also yields further insights into the design and implementation problems the NFIP faces.