Category Archives: Homeowners Insurance

Homeowners Insurance, Industry Financials, Insurers and the Economy, Market Conditions

IRC: Homeowners’ Insurance Rate Filing Growing Less Efficient

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By William Nibbelin, Senior Research Actuary, Triple-I

The rate-filing process for homeowners’ insurance has become less efficient and effective, a new study by the Insurance Research Council (IRC) shows.

The report – Rate Regulation in Homeowners Insurance: A Comparison of State Systems – analyzed industry data from 2010 through 2024 across all states, including the District of Columbia. The study found that, not only is it taking longer for insurers to get rate increases approved, but the increases are lower than requested, with bigger gaps between the request and the granted amount than had previously been the case.

Key findings:

  • The number of rate filings is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 3.3 percent from 2018 to 2024 nationwide.
  • The average number of days to approval grew from 44 to 63 days.
  • The number of filings withdrawn increased from 2.9 percent of filings to 3.9 percent of filings.
  • The percentage of filings receiving less rate impact than requested grew by more than 10 points.
  • The disparity in approved rate impact grew by nearly 1 point.
  • Market concentration (as measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, or HHI) decreased by 14.6 percent.
  • The residual share of direct written premium has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 10.5 percent from 2020 to 2024
  • A strong-to-moderate correlation exists between net underwriting losses and premium shortfalls within states and across time.
  • Filing process measures and market outcomes vary by regulatory systems.

During this same period from 2010 through 2023, the homeowners’ insurance industry experienced a net combined ratio over 100 in 10 of the 15 years. Combined ratio – calculated as losses and expenses divided by earned premium plus operating expenses divided by written premium – is a key measure of underwriting profitability. A combined ratio over 100 represents an underwriting loss.

The IRC report includes the determination of a strong correlation between underwriting loss and premium shortfalls, defined as the potential dollar difference between the effective filed rate impact and approved rate impact.

In California, for example, the time to approval exceeds that of the next highest state – New York – by more than four months. California also has the second-fastest-growing residual market share from 2.1 percent in 2019 to 8.2 percent in 2024 and the second-fastest-growing excess and surplus homeowners market share from 0.3 percent in 2010 to 6.3 percent in 2024. This means that, at most, only 85 percent of California homeowners’ insurance is covered by a standard policy.

IRC, like Triple-I, is an affiliate of The Institutes.

Homeowners Insurance, Risk-Based Pricing

Illinois Lawmakers
Reject Risk-Based
Pricing Challenge

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By Lewis Nibbelin, Research Writer, Triple-I 

Illinois insurers narrowly avoided increased government involvement in insurance pricing as state legislators rejected “an extreme prior-approval system found nowhere else in the country,” according to a joint statement from the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, and the Illinois Insurance Association.

If approved, the bill would have given regulators the authority to block rate change and order refunds from insurers for premiums deemed excessive, effectively generating “fewer choices and greater instability,” the statement continued.

While calls for the bill began in July, following homeowners’ insurance rate hikes, Illinois has a history of legislative challenges to actuarially sound pricing. Similar legislation in Louisiana passed that same month, amid record rate filing rejections in Pennsylvania and two California lawsuits accusing insurers of deliberately underinsuring policyholders to maximize profits.

Such trends underscore pervasive misunderstandings surrounding risk-based pricing, the practice under which insurers offer different prices for the same coverage based on risk factors specific to the insured. Without it, insurers could not adequately cover mounting natural catastrophe losses, inflationary pressures, and other rising costs, leading to an insufficient policyholder surplus to pay claims. When surplus falls below a certain threshold, insurers must raise premium rates, adjust their coverage availability, or, in extreme cases, become insolvent.

Under this pricing methodology, Illinois benefits from better coverage affordability compared to the national average and a competitive insurance market of more than 200 operating insurers.

“Illinois has a very stable insurance marketplace,” said Triple-I CEO Sean Kevelighan. “Restrictive legislation could lead to a California-like regulatory environment that would impact insurance affordability and availability in the state, rather than help consumers as intended.”

Rather than involve themselves in the complexity of insurance pricing, policymakers in Illinois and elsewhere would do a greater service to their constituents by exploring and investing in risk reduction through cost-saving mitigation and resilience investments. The property/casualty insurance industry can be a valuable partner in such beneficial approaches.

Learn More: 

New Illinois Bills Would Harm — Not Help — Auto Policyholders

Resilience Investment Payoffs Outpace Future Costs More Than 30 Times

L.A. Homeowners’ Suits Misread California’s Insurance Troubles

California Insurance Market at a Critical Juncture

Auto Insurance, Business Insurance, Homeowners Insurance, Industry Financials, Market Conditions, Workers Compensation

Despite Headwinds,
P/C Insurance Industry Maintains Course in 2025

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By William Nibbelin, Senior Research Actuary, Triple-I

The U.S. property/casualty (P/C) insurance industry is on track for a second consecutive year of underwriting profitability in 2025, and is projected to grow faster than the broader U.S. economy, according to the latest Insurance Economics and Underwriting Projections: A Forward View report from Triple-I and Milliman. The report, which is based on data through the first half of 2025, highlights continued progress despite persistent geopolitical and natural catastrophe uncertainties.

Positive Economic Signals and Lingering Concerns

The industry’s economic outlook remains cautiously optimistic. According to Michel Léonard, Ph.D., CBE, chief economist and data scientist at Triple-I, the industry has benefited from stronger-than-expected underlying growth. He also noted that P/C replacement costs continue to rise more slowly than overall inflation.

However, Léonard also pointed to factors that make the outlook for 2026 especially important to watch.

 “Ongoing risks, including tariffs, labor market softening and persistent inflation,” could pose challenges, he said. While the impact of tariffs has been less severe than initially anticipated, their long-term effect remains an open question.

Underwriting Performance: A Mixed Bag

Overall underwriting profitability for 2025 is expected to be a repeat of 2024, but to a lesser degree. The performance gap between personal lines and commercial lines is narrowing.  

“Favorable second-quarter results for homeowners helped narrow the anticipated 2025 gap between personal and commercial lines performance created by the Los Angeles fires in the first quarter,” said Patrick Schmid, Ph.D., Triple-I’s chief insurance officer.

Schmid also noted that personal lines premium growth is expected to remain higher than commercial lines by one point in 2025. That difference is projected to disappear by 2027.

Personal Lines

  • Personal Auto: The personal auto sector continues to be a highlight, with its forecast 2025 Net Combined Ratio (NCR) on track for continued profitability. The forecast has also slightly improved from prior estimates.
  • Homeowners: Despite favorable results in the second quarter, the homeowners’ NCR forecast for 2025 is still expected to be unprofitable for the year.

Commercial Lines

  • General Liability: This continues to be a line of concern. According to Jason B. Kurtz, FCAS, MAAA, a principal and consulting actuary at Milliman, “We see underwriting losses continuing in 2025, with the 2025 net combined ratio for GL forecast at 107.1.” He also said that, while slight improvement is expected in 2026-2027, “we estimate GL combined ratios to remain above 100.” Kurtz added, “Direct incurred loss ratios through mid-2025 have not improved relative to 2024’s poor result. Forecasted net written premium growth of 8.0 percent is 4.8 points above 2024 as premiums respond to recent performance.”
  • Workers Compensation: In contrast to general liability, workers’ compensation remains the strongest-performing major line in the P/C industry. Preliminary 2025 results from NCCI show calendar year combined ratios in the range of 85–93 percent. Donna Glenn, Chief Actuary at NCCI, noted, “If this holds, it will represent 12 consecutive years of combined ratios under 100% for private carriers.” For more details on the preliminary Workers Comp 2025 results, see NCCI’s full analysis in 2025 in Sight, 2024 in Review: The Latest Results for Workers Compensation.

Delving Deeper: A Members-Only View

For members who want to dig deeper into the projections, the full Insurance Economics and Underwriting Projections: A Forward View report offers a more granular analysis, including:

  • A detailed look at personal auto and commercial auto results, breaking down the quarterly experience between auto liability and physical damage.
  • A forecast of net combined ratio and net written premium growth specific to farmowners insurance.
  • A comparison of commercial property sub-lines.
  • A breakdown of commercial multiple peril results, differentiating between property and liability performance.

The next quarterly report will be presented at a members-only webinar in January 2026.

Catastrophes, Disaster Preparedness, Disaster Resilience, Homeowners Insurance, Wildfire

Study Supports Defensible Space, Home Hardening as Wildfire Resilience Tools

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A recent paper published in Nature that  analyzes five major California wildfires confirms what insurers, fire scientists, and risk modelers have long asserted: Defensible space and home hardening help mitigate wildfire risk and improve resilience.

The study found that clearing vegetation and flammable materials within 1.5 meters of a structure — an area known as “Zone 0” — is one of the most effective actions a homeowner can take. When this is paired with home-hardening features like non-combustible siding, enclosed eaves, and vent screens, the results are staggering: predicted losses dropped by as much as 48 percent, according to the study.

Homes built after 1997, when California adopted stricter building codes, consistently outperformed older structures. These newer homes incorporated fire-resistant materials and design features that significantly improved survival rates.

From an insurance perspective, such steps – by leading to reduced losses and fewer, less-costly claims – can alleviate some of the upward pressure on premium rates in areas at higher risk for wildfire. In the long term, they can improve insurance affordability and availability in fire-vulnerable geographies.

Wildfire risk is strongly conditioned by geographic considerations that vary widely across and within states. A recent paper by Triple-I and Guidewire – a provider of software solutions to the insurance industry – used case studies from three California areas with very different geographic and demographic characteristics to go deeper into how such tools can be used to identify properties with attractive risk properties, despite their location in wildfire-prone areas. The use of such data-driven analysis can help insurers identify less risky properties within higher-risk geographies. 

The study in Nature examined five major fires from recent history in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) – Tubbs (2017), Thomas (2017), Camp (2018), Kincade (2019), and Glass (2020) – using machine learning to analyze on-the-ground post-fire data collection, remotely sensed data, and fire reconstruction modeling to assess patterns of loss and mitigation effectiveness.

Using a tool called an XGBoost classifier, the study found that “structure survivability can be predicted to 82 percent.” The study reported that “spacing between structures is a critical factor influencing fire risk…while fire exposure, the ignition resistance (hardening) of structures, and clearing around structures (defensible space) work in combination” to mitigate that risk.

“With the science-based information from this report, we can reduce risk and make our communities safer from wildfire,” said Janet Ruiz, Triple-I’s California-based director of strategic communication.  Accuracy of 82 percent on predictability of structures burning is a major improvement, and mitigation is the key.”

Coordinated community-wide strategies like vegetation management, building code enforcement, and distance between structures are essential. Triple-I and its members and partners are working to inform, educate, and drive behavioral change to reduce risk and build resilience.

Learn More:

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P&C Insurance Achieves Best Results Since 2013; Wildfire Losses, Tariffs Threaten 2025 Prospects

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California Finalizes Updated Modeling Rules, Clarifies Applicability Beyond Wildfire

Fire, Homeowners Insurance, Lightning, Risk Management, Technology

Can a Fire-Prevention Device Be a “Gateway Drug” to Home Resilience?

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By Lewis Nibbelin, Contributing Writer, Triple-I

Tying a fire-prevention IoT device to the distribution networks of major insurers may have cracked the code for modifying human behavior toward risk prediction and prevention, says the CEO of Whisker Labs, the producer of Ting.

Ting helps protect homes from electrical fires by using AI to detect arcing – the precursor to most electrical fires. Once connected to an outlet, Ting analyzes 30 million measurements per second to detect tiny electrical anomalies and power-quality problems. On average, Ting detects and mitigates fire hazards in 1 out of every 60 homes it protects.

Whisker Labs works with a growing community of insurers who provide Ting to their customers for free.  More than one million Tings are deployed in the United States, and approximately 50,000 are installed each month. In his second appearance on Triple-I’s Executive Exchange video series in two years, Whisker Labs founder and CEO Bob Marshall reported to Triple-I CEO Sean Kevelighan on the product’s results to date.

“One of the cool things we’ve learned over the last couple of years is that insurers have found that Ting is like the gateway drug,” Marshall said. “I mean, if you actually get Ting into your customer’s home and we deliver a great experience to them, they’re much more willing to engage in water-loss prevention after that. So, it’s really critical that the homeowners engage.”

Ease of use has been critical to Ting’s success, Marshall said, pointing out that earlier attempts at similar products were “too complicated for the customer, too complicated for the carrier, and that’s why they didn’t work. With Ting, you just plug it in and it does its thing.”

Recent research demonstrated the efficacy and value provided by Ting. In partnership with Triple-I and Octagram Analytics, Whisker Labs found that Ting resulted in 0.39 fewer electrical fire claims per 1,000 home years of experience, translating to a fire claims reduction benefit of $81 per customer per year by the third year after installation. As Whisker Labs works with its growing community of insurers to extend Ting’s reach, Marshall believes these figures could improve even further.

“What we see in that study is that the claims frequency drops dramatically in the days, weeks, and months after you plug in Ting,” Marshall said, noting that the source for this finding “is not our data – it’s data from all the carriers that we work with.”

Kevelighan agreed that “from a carrier perspective, getting more of these into the community will make the community more resilient and more insurable,” particularly within dense neighborhoods and cities where fires can spread quickly. Such settings highlight the collective responsibility of risk mitigation on consumers as well as insurers, who play a key role in disseminating prevention solutions, Kevelighan stressed.

Though more public education surrounding IoT is needed, Marshall noted that homeowners familiar with Ting’s success are often receptive to additional IoT solutions for other risks, potentially sending ripple effects of risk mitigation throughout the industry. His firm and their research collaborators aim for similar versatility with the Ting study, whose methodology has broad applicability for many types of prevention solutions.

“‘Predict and prevent’ – that’s a vision that, I think, rings true for everybody,” Marshall concluded, because “the best claim is the one that never happens. We just want to be a key part of it and help drive it.”

Learn More:

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Disaster Preparedness, Disaster Resilience, Homeowners Insurance, Insurers and the Economy, Legal Environment, Market Conditions, Regulation

Calls for Insurance-Price Legislation Would Hurt Policyholders, Not Help

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Increased legislative involvement in regulating homeowners’ insurance pricing and rates – as recently called for by some officials in Illinois – would hurt insurance affordability in the state, rather than helping consumers as intended, Triple-I says in its latest Issues Brief.

Rising premiums are a national issue. They reflect a combination of costly climate-related weather events, demographic trends, and rising material and labor costs to repair and replace damaged or destroyed property. Average insured catastrophe losses have been increasing for decades, fueled in part by natural disasters and population shifts into high-risk areas. More recently, these and other losses to which the property/casualty insurance industry is vulnerable were exacerbated by inflation related to the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Tariffs and changes in U.S. economic policies have since put even more upward pressure on costs.

These increasing costs – if not addressed – threaten to erode the policyholder surplus insurers are required to keep on hand to pay claims. If surplus falls below a certain level, insurers have no choice but to increase premium rates or adjust their willingness to assume risks in certain areas.

To avoid this, many insurers have filed with state regulators for rate increases – requests that often meet with resistance from consumer advocacy groups and legislators. Illinois would not be the first state to try to ease consumers’ pain by constraining insurers’ ability to accurately set coverage prices to reflect increasing levels of risk and costs.

Practicality, not politics

Such efforts, while perhaps politically popular, confuse one symptom (higher premiums) of a growing risk crisis with its underlying cause (increasing losses and rising costs). Using the blunt instrument of legislation to address the complexities and sensitivities of underwriting and pricing would tend to disrupt the market and further hurt insurance affordability – and, in some areas, availability.

Rather than target insurers with misguided legislation, the brief says, states would be wiser to work with the industry to improve their risk profiles by investing in mitigation and resilience. The brief describes the causes of higher premium rates nationally and in Illinois and how other states have successfully collaborated to address those causes and reduce upward pressure on – and eventually bring down –premium rates.

“Triple-I welcomes the opportunity to collaborate with state policymakers to develop constructive approaches to risk mitigation and resilience that will benefit communities and consumers,” the brief says.

Learn More:

Revealing Hidden Cost to Consumers of Auto Litigation Inflation

Easing Home Upkeep to Control Insurance Costs

Survey: Homeowners See Value of Aerial Imagery for Insurers; Education Key to Comfort Levels

Nonprofit to Rescue NOAA Billion-Dollar Dataset

2025 Cat Losses to Date Are 2nd-Costliest Since Records Have Been Kept

2025 Tornadoes Highlight Convective Storm Losses

Auto Premium Growth Slows as Policyholders Shop Around, Study Says

Litigation Reform Works: Florida Auto Insurance Premium Rates Declining

IoT Solutions Offer Homeowners, Insurers Value — But How Much?

Texas: A Microcosm of U.S. Climate Perils

New Illinois Bills Would Harm — Not Help — Auto Policyholders

Illinois Bill Highlights Need for Education on Risk-Based Pricing of Insurance Coverage

Hail: The “Death by 1,000 Paper Cuts” Peril

Homeowners Insurance, Risk Management, Roof Condition, Technology

Easing Home Upkeep to Control Insurance Costs

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By Lewis Nibbelin, Contributing Writer, Triple-I

With home repair and remodeling costs rising 61 percent over the past decade, many homeowners are delaying or forgoing routine maintenance for older homes. In a recent Executive Exchange discussion with Triple-I CEO Sean Kevelighan, PreFix founder and CEO James Bilodeau discussed how his Texas-based company can help insurers promote such maintenance to mitigate more expensive losses down the line.

PreFix pairs clients with individual repair technicians to deliver personalized, year-round home repair, including two annual maintenance visits for filter replacements and comprehensive home inspections, Bilodeau said.

For maintenance visits, Bilodeau explained, PreFix will “clean your AC condenser and condensate line; change your air and water filters; flush the sediment out of your water heater; clean the lint out of your dryer outtake; sanitize your washer and dishwasher with a natural cleansing agent; and change all the batteries in your smoke alarms,” among other tasks.

The firm also modifies its services based on insurer preferences and the specific risk profile of homes in a given area.

“We’re able to offer highly granular customized data collection on all of the homes that we service through direct observation of issues that can correlate to non-cat losses,” Bilodeau said, noting identification of corroded water valves, overhanging tree branches, and unsecured exterior doors can facilitate “resolution quickly, before extensive damage happens.”

By continuously monitoring and mitigating these risks, Bilodeau believes his firm can help lower underwriting costs and premiums, as well as support smart home telematics adoption and catastrophe risk modeling.

“While aggregation is useful – which is what many providers do – many of the component inputs like home inspection data degrade quickly over two to five years,” Bilodeau said. “Inaccuracy can then be exacerbated when the data is extrapolated to other homes using inference.”

Kevelighan added that initial inspections as part of the home buying process often overlook or fail to communicate the true risks a property faces, leaving homeowners unaware of risks until catastrophe strikes.

“If you can enter risk management into the process of home purchasing much sooner and help the customer understand what they are purchasing beyond the four walls of their house and the community that it’s in, that could very much create a win-win for the insurer and the customer,” Kevelighan said.

Kevelighan and Bilodeau agreed that removing friction from home maintenance is imperative not only to better accommodate consumers, but to facilitate the insurance industry’s shift beyond repairing and replacing damaged property to predicting and preventing damage to begin with. Solutions like PreFix highlight how proactive loss mitigation necessarily involves engages all affected parties that have a stake in mitigation and resilience.

Learn More:

Survey: Homeowners See Value of Aerial Imagery for Insurers; Education Key to Comfort Levels

IoT Solutions Offer Homeowners, Insurers Value — But How Much?

JIF 2025: U.S. Policy Changes and Uncertainty Imperil Insurance Affordability

Lightning-Related Homeowners Claims Fell 16.5% in 2024

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Disasters, Litigation Reshape Homeowners’ Insurance Affordability

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LGBTQIA+ Homeownership Gap May Be Fueling Insurance Protection Gap

When No One’s Home: Understanding Role of Vacancy Insurance

Why Roof Resilience Matters More Than Ever

Study Touts Payoffs From Alabama Wind Resilience Program

2025 Tornadoes Highlight Convective Storm Losses

L.A. Homeowners’ Suits Misread California’s Insurance Troubles

Data Granularity Key to Finding Less Risky Parcels in Wildfire Areas

Disaster Preparedness, Disaster Resilience, Homeowners Insurance, Risk Management, Roof Condition, Technology, Wind

Survey: Homeowners See Value of Aerial Imagery for Insurers; Education Key to Comfort Levels

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Among homeowners surveyed by the Insurance Research Council (IRC), 88 percent recognize that aerial imagery is a beneficial tool for insurers.

Nearly all respondents said they recognize the value of using satellite, drone, and aircraft images for early problem detection, claims processing, and hazard identification before costly damage occurs. Most also said they believe aerial imaging can lead to fairer pricing.

Key findings:

  • Nine out of 10 respondents said they see at least one benefit from aerial imagery’s use in insurance. More than half said it leads to fairer insurance pricing.
  • While 60 percent have some awareness that insurers use aerial imagery, 40 percent know little or nothing about it.
  • When homeowners are familiar with the use of aerial imagery for underwriting, they are nearly twice as likely to think it makes insurance pricing fairer.
  • Homeowners worry more about accuracy than privacy in the context of aerial imagery. Accuracy emerges as the top individual concern, with 31 percent citing it as their biggest worry, compared to 24 percent who cite privacy as their primary concern.

Education and transparency are key to acceptance of this technology, the survey found.  Homeowners who were already familiar with aerial imagery applications were found to show consistently higher confidence levels, greater benefit recognition, and more positive sentiment across all insurance uses. Younger homeowners also demonstrated greater acceptance and higher confidence in the technology’s accuracy.

“Consumers see value in aerial imagery when they understand how it’s used in insurance,” said IRC President Pat Schmid. “Efforts to increase transparency and consumer knowledge can bridge the confidence gap, improve customer trust, and help homeowners realize the benefits of faster claims, fairer pricing, and better risk prevention.”

The IRC, like Triple-I, is an affiliate of The Institutes.

Catastrophes, Coastal Property, Disaster Preparedness, Disaster Resilience, Flood Insurance, Floods, Homeowners Insurance, Hurricane, Lightning, Market Conditions, Severe Convective Storm, Technology, Wildfire, Wind

Nonprofit to Rescue NOAA Billion-Dollar Dataset

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A climate nonprofit plans to revive a key federal database tracking billion-dollar weather and climate disasters that the Trump Administration stopped updating in May, Bloomberg reported.

The database captures the financial toll of increasingly intense weather events and was used by insurers and others to understand, model, and predict weather perils across the United States. Dr. Adam B. Smith, the former NOAA climatologist who spearheaded the database for more than a decade, has been hired to manage it for the nonprofit, Climate Central.

NOAA in May announced it would stop tracking the cost of the country’s most expensive disasters, those which cause at least $1 billion in damage – a move that would leave insurers, researchers, and government policymakers with less reliable information to help understand the patterns of major disasters like hurricanes, drought or wildfires, and their economic consequences.

Climate Central plans to expand beyond the database’s original scope by tracking disasters as small as $100 million and calculating losses from individual wildfires, rather than simply reporting seasonal regional totals.

A record 28 billion-dollar disasters hit the United States in 2023, including a drought that caused $14.8 billion in damages. In 2024, 27 incidents of that scale occurred. Since 1980, an average of nine such events have struck in the United States annually.

This summer – amid deadly wildfires and floods – the Trump Administration has appeared to be rolling back some of its DOGE-driven NOAA funding cuts. NOAA recently announced that it would be hiring 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians for the National Weather Service (NWS), after having terminated over 550 such positions in the already-understaffed agency in the spring.

In addition, the administration’s announced termination of the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program — run by the  Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) — has been held up by a court injunction while legislators debate its future.  Congress established BRIC through the Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018 to ensure a stable funding source to support mitigation projects annually. The program has allocated more than $5 billion for investment in mitigation projects to alleviate human suffering and avoid economic losses from floods, wildfires, and other disasters.

Regarding the rescue of the NOAA dataset, Colorado State University researcher and Triple-I non-resident scholar Dr. Phil Klotzbach said, “The billion-dollar disaster dataset is important for those of us working to better understand the impacts of tropical cyclones. It uses a consistent methodology to estimate damage caused by natural disasters from 1980 to the present and was a critical input to our papers investigating the relationship between landfalling wind, pressure and damage. I’m very happy to hear that this dataset will continue!”

Learn More:

Some Weather Service Jobs Being Restored; BRIC Still Being Litigated

2025 Cat Losses to Date Are 2nd-Costliest Since Records Have Been Kept

CSU Sticks to Hurricane Season Forecast, Warns About Near-Term Activity

Russia Quake Highlights Unpredictability of Natural Catastrophes

Texas: A Microcosm of U.S. Climate Perils

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Catastrophes, Coastal Property, Disaster Preparedness, Disaster Resilience, Earthquakes, Floods, Homeowners Insurance, Hurricane, Lightning, Regulation, Risk Management, Severe Convective Storm, Tornado, Wildfire, Wind

Some Weather Service Jobs Being Restored;
BRIC Still Being Litigated

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Amid a summer full of deadly fires and storm-related flooding, the Trump Administration appears to be rolling back some of the spending cuts imposed upon the National Weather Service (NWS) by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – of which NWS is a part – announced at an internal all-hands meeting earlier this month that they will hire 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians. CNN reported the announcement, citing an unnamed NOAA official. In jointly timed press releases, Congressmen Mike Flood and Eric Sorensen (D-Ill.) and Mike Flood (R-Neb.) acknowledged the planned hirings.

While the decision is welcome news, both congressmen continued to urge their colleagues to pass their bipartisan Weather Workforce Improvement Act to ensure these positions will remain permanent and not be subject to any future reductions. 

“For months, Congressman Flood and I have been fighting to get NOAA and NWS employees the support they need in the face of cuts to staff and funding,” Sorenson said. “Hundreds of unfilled positions have caused NWS offices across the country to cancel weather balloon launches, forgo overnight staffing, and force remaining meteorologists to overwork themselves.”

“For decades the National Weather Service has helped keep our communities safe with accurate and timely forecasts,” said Flood, adding that the NOAA announcement “sends a message that they’re focused on strengthening the NWS for years to come.”  

NOAA and FEMA cuts raised fears

It’s not just the NOAA and NWS cuts that have raised concerns. On April 4, 2025, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced that it would be ending its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program and cancel all BRIC applications from fiscal years 2020-2023. Congress established BRIC through the Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018 to ensure a stable funding source to support mitigation projects annually. The program has allocated more than $5 billion for investment in mitigation projects to alleviate human suffering and avoid economic losses from floods, wildfires, and other disasters.

At the time, Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM), called the decision to terminate BRIC “beyond reckless.”

 “Although ASFPM has had some qualms about how FEMA’s BRIC program was implemented, it was still a cornerstone of our nation’s hazard mitigation strategy, and the agency has worked to make improvements each year,” Berginnis said. “Eliminating it entirely — mid-award cycle, no less — defies common sense.”

Resilience investment is key to long-term insurance availability and affordability.  Average insured catastrophe losses have been on the rise for decades, reflecting a combination of climate-related factors and demographic trends as more people have moved into harm’s way.

Efforts have been made to save BRIC, and a U.S. District Judge in Boston recently granted a preliminary injunction sought by 20 Democrat-led states while their lawsuit over the funding moves ahead. Judge Richard G. Stearns ruled the Trump Administration cannot reallocate $4 billion meant to help communities protect against natural disasters.

In his ruling, Stearns said he was not convinced Congress had given FEMA any discretion to redirect the funds. The states had also shown that the “balance of hardship and public interest” was in their favor.

“There is an inherent public interest in ensuring that the government follows the law, and the potential hardship accruing to the States from the funds being repurposed is great,” Stearns wrote. “The BRIC program is designed to protect against natural disasters and save lives.”

Learn More

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Texas: A Microcosm of U.S. Climate Perils

BRIC Funding Loss Underscores Need for Collective Action on Climate Resilience

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