Source: Aftermath of the Mississippi tornadoes. Source: Mississippi Emergency Management Agency

Plus: Mississippi's tornado outbreak, Colorado's late-season blizzard, and a Nevada earthquake swarm that won't quit

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FEMA Review Council Releases Final Report

On May 7, the FEMA Review Council released its final report, the product of more than a year of stakeholder engagement and the most significant proposed overhaul of federal disaster policy in years. The ten recommendations would reshape how the federal government, states, and survivors share responsibility before, during, and after a disaster. The full report, presentation, and meeting agenda are available on DHS's publication page. Read takeaways from stakeholders in the Pro Perspective Section below.

Major Disasters of the Last Week

Forecasted Risks for Next Week

Severe storms continue across the Southeast through Friday. Damaging winds and a few tornadoes are possible across southeast Alabama, south Georgia, and north Florida on May 7 and 8 as the system that struck Mississippi tracks east, with isolated severe potential lingering into the central Gulf coast and South Carolina.

Above-normal wildfire potential continues across the High Plains, Southwest, and Florida. NIFC's May outlook keeps elevated fire potential in place for parts of New Mexico, Arizona, eastern Colorado, west Texas, and Florida, driven by below-normal precipitation and minimum dead-fuel moisture readings.

Severe storms return to the southern Plains by Tuesday and Wednesday as an upper-level system swings in from the west, with potential for supercells, large hail, damaging winds, and tornadoes from north Texas into the western Ozarks. Forecasters see a clear threat building but say it is still too early to pin down exactly where storms will fire.

Rainbow cloud spotted in Indonesia earlier this week.

Disasters in the Headlines

Trump-appointed FEMA Review Council proposes sweeping changes to federal disaster support

AP News

FEMA said it answered the phone during the Texas floods. Most callers didn’t get through.

E&E News

Flag becomes symbol of Helene recovery

Rocky Mountain News

PRO PERSPECTIVE

Recommendations on Paper, Reform in Practice

After many months of stakeholder meetings, public comment, and weeks of speculation about what would survive the cutting room, the FEMA Review Council's final report is now in the open. The reaction across emergency management, insurance, legal, and NGO circles is not so much agreement or disagreement. It is a shared question: what happens next?

We brought together five stakeholders working across the disaster ecosystem to share their first read. Their perspectives reflect the breadth of the system the Council is asking Congress to reshape: a former FEMA Administrator, a former Deputy Administrator turned insurance executive, a senior disaster recovery attorney, and two leaders from the country's largest low-income housing advocacy coalition. What emerged was not a single take but a layered look at where the report aligns with momentum already on Capitol Hill, where the recommendations could move the needle for survivors, and where critical voices feel they were left out of the room.

The clearest signal in the report, according to Danielle Aymond, Of Counsel at Baker Donelson, is "the explicit push for legislative action, not just administrative tweaks." That signal points the work toward Congress, where the FEMA Reform Act of 2025 (HR 4669) is already moving on a parallel track. Aymond describes "meaningful alignment" between the Council's recommendations and the bill, "particularly around faster funding delivery, moving away from reimbursement models, and increasing state control." 

One notable shift between drafts is also worth flagging. The December version specifically called for FEMA to remain within DHS, while the final report drops that position, bringing it closer to Congress's interest in an independent agency. What remains unresolved, in Aymond's read, are NFIP reform, parametric triggers, and disaster declaration thresholds, which she identifies as "where stakeholders should expect the most negotiation and refinement going forward." She also pointed to a tension inside the report itself, calling the increased direct technical assistance in Recommendation 8 a "direct contradiction" with Recommendations 1 and 10, which shift responsibility outward to states.

The contradiction Aymond flagged is exactly where Noah Patton, Director of Disaster Recovery at the National Low Income Housing Coalition, and Meghan Mertyris, an Analyst with the Coalition's Disaster Housing Recovery Coalition (DHRC), see the deepest risk. Patton argues that pushing responsibility downward will reduce assistance for the households who need it most. "States are not prepared to take on that role," he said, and recent restructuring has made it harder, not easier, for them to build the capacity to try. His concern is blunt: rather than fixing the existing system, the country could end up with "50 plus broken disaster response and recovery systems" instead of one. 

Mertyris adds the engagement piece, pointing out that frontline practitioners and survivors submitted significant input during the comment period that "stand[s] in stark, stark contrast to the actual content of the draft report." In her view, the Council "left a lot of valuable insight and partnership on the table." Both look to the bipartisan Fixing Emergency Management for Americans Act as a more workable starting point, particularly its "carrot approach," which rewards states that invest in resilience and mitigation with higher cost shares rather than penalizing those that cannot.

Daniel Kaniewski, founder of Northstar Risk & Resilience and a Bright Harbor advisor, reads the report through both a federal and an insurance industry lens, having served as FEMA's Deputy Administrator for Resilience and later as Managing Director for the Public Sector at Marsh. The recommendations themselves, he says, are "consistent with views that so many of us have within the emergency management community," especially the calls to move assistance faster and reach survivors sooner. The harder question is what comes next. As Kaniewski points out, "it will take a change in the Stafford Act for many of these recommendations to become reality," which means the report's fate runs through the same legislative process Aymond is tracking. 

He was also encouraged by what didn't make the final cut. Earlier drafts had floated phasing out the National Flood Insurance Program in favor of private carriers, but the Council ultimately took a more moderate position. NFIP needs reform, Kaniewski agrees, but it also needs to remain in place. As he put it, "NFIP and the private markets need to coexist for quite some time" while private markets gradually take on more flood risk.

Pulling these threads together, three things are worth tracking now. First, the legislative pathway. Roughly a dozen recommendations carry an estimated 150 sub-actions, and the most consequential ones require statutory change. Second, the unresolved trio of NFIP reform, parametric triggers, and declaration thresholds, which will define how close the final law gets to the Council's recommendations. Third, the capacity question. Any shift to states needs a parallel investment in state-level emergency management, or the gap lands on survivors.

What ties all of this together is disaster recovery itself, and Pete Gaynor, President of Bright Harbor and former FEMA Administrator, keeps the focus there. As the proposed reforms move toward operationalization, he says, "improving survivor outcomes [must] remain a priority at every level," and FEMA must stay capable of supporting state, local, tribal, and territorial partners through increasingly complex disasters. Beneath the debates over thresholds, block grants, and where FEMA sits on an org chart, the measure of any of this is whether a family standing in front of a flooded home, a destroyed business, or a wiped-out neighborhood gets the support they need, faster and more fully than the current system allows. Recommendations live or die at that doorstep. The report has been heard. The next chapter will be written by Congress, by the administration, and by states. But the voice that has to carry through every one of those rooms is the voice of the survivor.

Active Federal Major Disasters

There is usually a 60 day window to apply for help after a disaster is declared.  The following disasters are still actively taking applications from survivors for financial support.

The following disasters are actively taking applications from survivors for financial support. To apply, survivors can visit DisasterAssistance.gov or call the FEMA Helpline at 1-800‑621‑3362.

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