October 28, 2019 - Issue: Vol. 165, No. 170 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 1st Session

[Pages H8484-H8487]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              FEDERAL DISASTER ASSISTANCE COORDINATION ACT

  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the 
bill

[[Page H8485]]

(H.R. 1306) to amend the Disaster Recovery Reform Act to develop a 
study regarding streamlining and consolidating information collection 
and preliminary damage assessments, and for other purposes, as amended.
  The Clerk read the title of the bill.
  The text of the bill is as follows:

                               H.R. 1306

       Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of 
     the United States of America in Congress assembled,

     SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

       This Act may be cited as the ``Federal Disaster Assistance 
     Coordination Act''.

     SEC. 2. STUDY TO STREAMLINE AND CONSOLIDATE INFORMATION 
                   COLLECTION AND PRELIMINARY DAMAGE ASSESSMENTS.

       (a) In General.--Section 1223 of the Disaster Recovery 
     Reform Act of 2018 (Public Law 115-254) is amended to read as 
     follows:

     ``SEC. 1223. STUDY TO STREAMLINE AND CONSOLIDATE INFORMATION 
                   COLLECTION AND PRELIMINARY DAMAGE ASSESSMENTS.

       ``(a) Information Collection.--Not later than 2 years after 
     the date of enactment of this section, the Administrator, in 
     coordination with the Small Business Administration, the 
     Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Disaster 
     Assistance Working Group of the Council of the Inspectors 
     General on Integrity and Efficiency, and other appropriate 
     agencies, shall--
       ``(1) conduct a study and develop a plan, consistent with 
     law, under which the collection of information from disaster 
     assistance applicants and grantees will be modified, 
     streamlined, expedited, efficient, flexible, consolidated, 
     and simplified to be less burdensome, duplicative, and time 
     consuming for applicants and grantees; and
       ``(2) develop a plan for the regular collection and 
     reporting of information on Federal disaster assistance 
     awarded, including the establishment and maintenance of a 
     website for presenting the information to the public.
       ``(b) Preliminary Damage Assessments.--Not later than 2 
     years after the date of enactment of this section, the 
     Administrator, in consultation with the Council of the 
     Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, shall convene 
     a working group on a regular basis with the Secretary of 
     Labor, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, 
     the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Administrator 
     of the Small Business Administration, the Secretary of 
     Transportation, the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for 
     Economic Development, and other appropriate agencies as the 
     Administrator considers necessary, to--
       ``(1) identify and describe the potential areas of 
     duplication or fragmentation in preliminary damage 
     assessments after disaster declarations;
       ``(2) determine the applicability of having 1 Federal 
     agency make the assessments for all agencies; and
       ``(3) identify potential emerging technologies, such as 
     unmanned aircraft systems, consistent with the requirements 
     established in the FEMA Accountability, Modernization and 
     Transparency Act of 2017 (42 U.S.C. 5121 note), to expedite 
     the administration of preliminary damage assessments.
       ``(c) Comprehensive Report.--The Administrator shall submit 
     1 comprehensive report that comprises the plans developed 
     under subsections (a)(1) and (a)(2) and a report of the 
     findings of the working group convened under subsection (b), 
     which may include recommendations, to the Committee on 
     Transportation and Infrastructure of the House of 
     Representatives and the Committee on Homeland Security and 
     Governmental Affairs of the Senate.
       ``(d) Public Availability.--The comprehensive report 
     developed under subsection (c) shall be made available to the 
     public and posted on the website of the Federal Emergency 
     Management Agency--
       ``(1) in pre-compressed, easily downloadable versions that 
     are made available in all appropriate formats; and
       ``(2) in machine-readable format, if applicable.
       ``(e) Sources of Information.--In preparing the 
     comprehensive report, any publication, database, or web-based 
     resource, and any information compiled by any government 
     agency, nongovernmental organization, or other entity that is 
     made available may be used.
       ``(f) Briefing.--Not later than 180 days after submission 
     of the comprehensive report, the Administrator of the Federal 
     Emergency Management Agency, or a designee, and a member of 
     the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and 
     Efficiency, or a designee, shall brief, upon request, the 
     appropriate congressional committees on the findings and any 
     recommendations made in the comprehensive report.''.
       (b) Technical Amendment.--The item relating to section 1223 
     in the table of contents of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 
     2018 (Public Law 115-254) is amended to read as follows:

``Sec. 1223. Study to streamline and consolidate information collection 
              and preliminary damage assessments.''.

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the rule, the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) and the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. 
Meadows) each will control 20 minutes.
  The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Oregon.


                             General Leave

  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members 
have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks 
and include extraneous material on H.R. 1306, as amended.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the 
gentleman from Oregon?
  There was no objection.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
  Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be standing on the floor here with my 
colleague, Mr. Meadows, at this time, perhaps a bit more in agreement.
  So this bill, H.R. 1306, the Federal Disaster Assistance Coordination 
Act, was introduced by Representatives Meadows and Peters. It amends 
the Disaster Recovery Reform Act, DRRA, so-called, to help Federal 
agencies streamline and consolidate information, collection, and 
preliminary damage assessments following disasters.
  When a disaster occurs, Americans don't have time to wait around for 
the bureaucracy to get the assistance that they are entitled to. Today, 
there are too many barriers that stand between emergency response and 
Americans in crisis due to a disaster, whether it is a flood, a 
hurricane, a wildfire, or an earthquake. Whatever the disaster might 
be, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other Federal agencies 
are supposed to be there to help.
  Currently, the implementation of those recovery efforts and that 
disaster assistance is hampered by inefficient information collection 
and assessments conducted by multiple agencies. Some of them even come 
in like a year after the fact and say: Wait a minute. We didn't 
authorize that. That kind of thing has got to stop.
  So this will remove information collection barriers that currently 
impede disaster aid. It creates a working group to identify duplicative 
assessments--we don't need to waste money on those--and it proposes 
getting rid of them by administrative rule or, if necessary, by 
legislation.
  Further, it would streamline Federal disaster recovery efforts by 
concluding that a single agency is sufficient to conduct damage 
assessments to account for the needs of disaster victims.
  Again, we have multiple agencies with conflicting opinions and 
numbers, and sometimes they come back to communities and want money 
back. Really? The other agency approved the money. Oh, but you didn't 
think--this has got to be done better, more efficiently, in 
coordination with a single lead. So I am pleased that this bill is 
before us today.
  Mr. Speaker, I obviously recommend an ``aye'' vote, and I reserve the 
balance of my time.
  Mr. MEADOWS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
  Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his kind comments. I have 
often wondered, on the pharmaceutical commercials that you see on TV, 
who is the individual who can speak as fast as the narrator and puts in 
the disclaimers. I have now found the gentleman from Oregon to be that 
individual, so it is a good day for me.
  I thank the gentleman for his support. Certainly, I rise in support 
of H.R. 1306, the Federal Disaster Assistance Coordination Act.
  As the chairman was noting, this is a bipartisan, commonsense piece 
of legislation that would amend the Disaster Recovery Reform Act and 
establish a process to identify ways to streamline it and consolidate 
the collection of certain disaster information.
  I would be remiss, Mr. Speaker, if I didn't mention the work of the 
gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Graves), along with the gentleman from 
California (Mr. Peters), in terms of really trying to make sure that, 
when we allocate dollars, they get to those people who are suffering 
most. The last thing we need is for them to be caught up in a 
bureaucracy that was not of their own making.
  Following a disaster, many times, damage assessment needs are to be 
done quickly. In North Carolina, even most recently, some of those get 
into a lot of finger-pointing back and forth, Mr. Speaker.
  Just last week, the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure 
received testimony from State and local

[[Page H8486]]

emergency managers on how that cumbersome process is and what it is 
now.
  So, while FEMA is certainly the lead Federal agency on disasters, 
there is often an alphabet soup of Federal agencies that have to get 
involved in the disaster response, and it is the local Federal 
coordinators that actually have to work in this recovery.
  So it is critical that we look throughout all of our agencies to 
minimize the overlap, certainly as it relates to assessments, and 
consider the use of newer technologies and how to streamline the 
process.
  Specifically, this bill will establish a Federal working group, led 
by FEMA, that would work with the Council of the Inspectors General on 
integrity and efficiency to determine how the damage assessment process 
can be streamlined and whether new technologies can be used to speed up 
the process.
  Mr. Speaker, this is just a good-government bill that will improve 
disaster recovery. As the gentleman knows, being from the great State 
of Texas, as well as I do, when people are hurting from disasters, what 
they want are fast, efficient recovery efforts. Hopefully, this 
bipartisan effort will do that.
  I encourage support of this bill, and I reserve the balance of my 
time.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I don't see any additional speakers, so I 
am prepared to close. I reserve the balance of my time.
  Mr. MEADOWS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from 
Louisiana (Mr. Graves).
  Mr. GRAVES of Louisiana. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman 
from North Carolina for yielding.
  Mr. Speaker, there are two sorts of Members: There are Members who 
have experienced and been through the devastation of disaster and the 
constituents they represent, and there are people who will. Those are 
the two types of Members we have in this body.
  The gentleman from North Carolina is one of those folks who has been 
through this. The people he represents have been through this. The 
current disaster process that we use oftentimes revictimizes the very 
disaster victims that we are trying to help, that we are trying to 
save.
  This legislation is very important and it is insightful. It is 
insightful because, number one, it brings newer ideas and newer 
technologies to the table on how we are actually going to quantify the 
damage associated with disasters.
  Let's not use these technologies and these techniques from the 1950s 
and 1960s when it is 2019 and 2020. We need to be taking advantage of 
these new technologies.
  What that does, Mr. Speaker, is it results in better, more accurate 
damage assessments where we are not contributing to the debt and 
wasting money, as we discussed in previous legislation; it results in 
faster recovery, faster response to those disaster victims who are out 
there.
  This legislation helps to ensure that instead of--we have had it in 
my home State of Louisiana. We have had our assessors out there doing 
work. We have had our State Homeland Security officials out there doing 
assessments. We have had SBA, we have had HUD, and we have had FEMA, 
and they all come up with different numbers, which is shocking to 
learn.
  The most efficient thing to do, the right thing to do, is to come up 
with a common set of principles: use new technology, quantify the 
disasters, inform how much money is needed and where it is needed, and 
let's help get response and recovery activities moving much faster, 
much better, and much more efficiently.
  Let me say it again. We have got to continue to stay focused on these 
disaster victims. So the faster, better, cheaper, that ends up 
benefiting them. We have had all of these disconnects in different 
programs because they are using different metrics and milestones.
  Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from North Carolina and I 
want to thank my friend from Oregon for working together on this. It is 
an important, insightful piece of legislation that is going to result 
in saving taxpayer funds; a better, more efficient response; stopping 
the tripping over each other; and, ultimately, moving in a direction 
where you have seamless sequencing of response and recovery activities.
  Mr. Speaker, I urge adoption of this legislation.
  Mr. MEADOWS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
  Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Louisiana for his 
comments. When you think of disaster recovery and think of a champion 
who has been wanting to address this, not just on this bill, but each 
and every bill that he looks at, there is no greater advocate that the 
American people have than the gentleman from Louisiana.
  In closing, I want to thank the chairman. Many times we can have 
different opinions on different particular pieces of legislation, but 
the gentleman has always been thoughtful, and certainly, under his 
leadership, in his chairmanship, he has worked in a bipartisan manner 
to advance legislation.
  I appreciate the gentleman's willingness to allow this bill to come 
to the floor, and I urge its adoption.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
  Mr. Speaker, just in reference to what the gentleman said earlier, 
once, when Barney Frank used to serve here, I was friendly with one of 
the recording clerks, and she would rate how many words per minute 
people could talk. Barney was faster than me. Sometimes I would be 
sitting here and people would say: What did he say? And I said: Oh, I 
can translate that. So I grew up in that era.
  But, returning to this bill, this is important, and this is not the 
end of our reforms. As the gentleman from Louisiana pointed out, just 
think of it this way: We had a very rare, bizarre snow event last 
winter, and I had five trees fall on my house. The insurance adjuster 
came out and said okay. We agreed on what it would take to fix the 
house.
  Now, imagine if that company had sent five different adjusters on 
different days and they all came up with different figures. The house 
was just finished last weekend. It took 9 months, but I would still be 
waiting, probably, for the repairs to start.
  That is what happens to people in some of these disasters. They are 
still waiting for the approvals they need to go forward and do the 
repairs, or they got funding from one agency for emergency housing 
assistance and then they are being told they can't get housing 
assistance or they can't get their home repaired because they took that 
money, even though no one told them when they took that money that that 
was going to disqualify them from some other agency.
  It has got to get straightened out. The Federal Government needs to 
coordinate this response, and this is just, I believe, the beginning of 
reforming these disaster assistance programs.
  And, oh, by the way, the National Flood Insurance Program is broke, 
and we have got to do something about that, too, including some 
reforms.
  Mr. Speaker, I urge a ``yes'' vote, and I yield back the balance of 
my time.
  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.

[[Page H8487]]

  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.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The question is on the motion offered by the 
gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) that the House suspend the rules 
and pass the bill, H.R. 1306, as amended.
  The question was taken; and (two-thirds being in the affirmative) the 
rules were suspended and the bill, as amended, was passed.
  The title of the bill was amended so as to read: ``A bill to amend 
the Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018 to develop a study regarding 
streamlining and consolidating information collection and preliminary 
damage assessments, and for other purposes.''.
  A motion to reconsider was laid on the table.

                          ____________________