The Miami Herald featured CSFI in their story, “Flood insurance costs are rising. Florida keeps paying, other states drop it.”  Miami Herald reporter Alex Harris interviewed NFIP experts, including EDF and CSFI.

The story explains that “The fate of the beleaguered program is crucial for Florida, which has a third of the federal government’s NFIP policies, more than any other state. It’s a load bearing part of hurricane recovery, too. By one analysis from the Florida Policy Institute, NFIP payouts to Floridians with flooded properties made up 50 percent of disaster aid the state got from the federal government last year.”

The story summarizes the past few years of NFIP administrative changes: “The new pricing strategy — called Risk Rating 2.0 — was designed to help the National Flood Insurance Program dig itself out of billions of dollars in debt after decades of cheaply insuring homes that tend to flood a lot.  So far, experts say, it’s working as advertised to raise prices for the most flood-prone spots and lower them in less risky areas, but some of those wins are clearly offset by the plummeting numbers of policyholders across the county. The study found an up to 39 percent decrease in new policies and a 13 percent decline in existing policies in just four years. That’s bad news for the program, which is in $22 billion of debt, plus faces rising costs to insure flood prone homes as climate change raises sea levels and intensifies rainstorms. Rather than permanently fix the NFIP, Congress has instead issued short-term authorizations (34 of them) that keep the program going as-is for just a little bit longer.”

CSFI stated that the recent lapse should “a wake-up call for Congress…The program absolutely needs to be reformed, but first it must have a few years of runway so we know it will exist.”

CSFI has found that, between September 2021 and October 2025, Florida’s policies in force have grown by 98,655 policies (or 5.84%).  Nationally, the program has lost 291,513 policies (or -5.95%).  According to NFIP’s FloodSmart data, there are now 4,607,601 NFIP policyholders nationally and 1,787,955 in Florida.