On 10/1/2020, President Trump signed H.R.8337 which extends the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) through September 30, 2021. While funding for the flood program, and other government programs, expired for about an hour after the September 30, 2020 deadline had passed, CNBC reports that President Trump signed the bill early Thursday after apparently getting back from a campaign trip to Minnesota. While the bill only extends many government functions through December 31, 2020, it does specifically extend the NFIP through September 30, 2021.
Specifically, the bill says this:
“a) Section 1309(a) of the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968 (42 U.S.C. 4016(a)) is amended by striking “September 30, 2019” and inserting “September 30, 2021”.
(b) Section 1319 of the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968 (42 U.S.C. 4026) is amended by striking “September 30, 2019” and inserting “September 30, 2021”.
(c) (1) This section shall become effective immediately upon enactment of this Act.
(2) If this Act is enacted after September 30, 2020, this section shall be applied as if it were in effect on September 30, 2020.”
This extension is the longest extension of the flood program that we have seen in recent years as the NFIP has been extended over a dozen times since 2017. Previously, some members of Congress were looking to make changes to the flood program - such as working to keep the program from continuing to loose money - rather than just extend the funding. While Congress had working on a 5 year bipartisan extension of the NFIP at the end of 2019, it appears that priorities have changed in Congress due to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the upcoming election. This extension appears to put another temporary delay on significant changes to the flood program so that Congress can deal with more pressing items at hand.
As an example of the many short term extensions we have seen over the last few years, the following list reflects the ten most recent extensions of the NFIP:
7/31/2018 to 11/30/2018
11/30/2018 to 12/7/2018
12/7/2018 to 12/21/2018
12/21/2018 to 5/31/2019
5/31/2019 to 6/14/2019
6/14/2019 to 9/30/2019
9/30/2019 to 11/21/2019
11/21/2019 to 12/20/2020
12/20/2020 to 9/30/2020
9/30/2020 to 9/30/2021
At this point, compliance professionals should be able to relax a bit knowing that no significant changes to the flood program - which would surely result in substantial changes to flood rules - won’t likely be happening for another year. However, compliance professionals should keep in mind that an updated set of Flood FAQs are expected to be finalized at some point in the future. Comments from the FAQ proposal (published on the Federal Register on 7/6/2020) were originally due on 9/4/2020, but are now due on 11/3/2020.
The full text of H.R.8337 can be found here.
A summary of H.R. 8337 can be found here.
The CNBC article reporting on the signing of H.R. 8337 can be found here.
The Federal Register publication of the flood FAQ proposal can be found here.
The comment period extension can be found here.