The FEMA Review Council Has Issued Their Final Report. Are States Ready For It?

By Lynn Knight, CEcD, and Stephen Jordan — Institute for Sustainable Development

The Final Report of the President’s Council to Assess the Federal Emergency Management Agency , released on May 7, confirms what many disaster recovery practitioners have recognized for years: states and local governments will increasingly be expected to lead disaster recovery, with the federal government serving in a more supporting role.

The Council’s doctrine — “locally executed, state managed, federally supported” — is sound in principle. But it assumes something that does not yet exist in much of the country: sufficient state and local recovery capacity.

In April 2025 — well before the FEMA Review Council report was released — the Institute for Sustainable Development (ISD) convened a working group of experienced practitioners in disaster recovery, resilience, economic development, infrastructure, finance, philanthropy, housing, and public policy to discuss precisely this challenge.

The conclusion was clear: the United States has extensive training systems for emergency management and disaster response, but virtually no structured education focused on long-term disaster recovery.

That gap matters because recovery is not simply emergency management extended over time. It involves housing, infrastructure rebuilding, economic stabilization, workforce recovery, public finance, resilience planning, community engagement, and navigating highly complex federal programs over a period that can last years after the initial disaster.

Yet many state and local leaders are forced to learn these systems in real time during crises.

Recognizing this growing national need, ISD began developing the concept for what is now the Academy for Community Resilience and Development (ACRD) — a practitioner-led initiative designed to help states and communities build long-term recovery and resilience leadership capacity before disasters occur. The Academy concept includes:

• A practical recovery and resilience curriculum,

• Peer-to-peer learning networks,

• Expert technical assistance,

• Leadership development, and

• Access to experienced practitioners across multiple recovery disciplines.

The Academy is intended to complement and add on to existing emergency management programs to fill in a major national gap around managing stabilization and long-term disaster recovery lessons learned and effective practices.

The FEMA Review Council report reinforces the need for these skill-sets and offerings. The report repeatedly calls for:

• Greater state and local responsibility,

• Expanded professional development,

• Scalable training resources,

• Stronger recovery capability standards, and

• Improved preparedness and coordination systems.

Shifting much of this responsibility to the states creates a major challenge because these skill-sets have been concentrated or subsidized by the federal government to an increasing extent over the years. As a result, many states simply never had strong incentives to build permanent recovery systems or specialized expertise.

Compounding the issue is that the individual states don't have nearly the deep pockets that the federal government has. This means that not only does state capacity need to be built up, states need to develop new strategies and policies to stretch their scarce resources as much as possible.

Whether FEMA ultimately becomes smaller, more decentralized, or simply more selective in its role, one thing is increasingly clear: states and communities will need substantially greater recovery capacity than they possess today.

Some quarters may under-estimate the state adaptation curve. The innovative NCIUA Resilience Catastrophe Bond took almost 18 years to work it's way through the North Carolina policy and legislative approval process. Other states will likely have similar processes to manage as they reconfigure themselves to this new reality.

The question now is whether the country prepares for this transition proactively — through coordinated investment in recovery leadership, training, and institutional capacity — or waits until the next catastrophic disaster forces that learning to occur under crisis conditions. The next eighteen months will be critical.

ISD welcomes dialogue with states, universities, foundations, nonprofits, and private-sector partners interested in helping build the next generation of disaster recovery leadership capacity in the United States.

(An earlier version of this article was published on LinkedIn.)