Flood, Mike: The Subcommittee on Housing and Insurance will come to order. Without objection, the Chair is authorized to declare a recess of the Committee at any time. This hearing is titled, Mitigation and Multiple Lost Properties, Factors Influencing the High Cost of Flooding. Without objection, all members will have five legislative days within which to submit extraneous materials to the Chair for inclusion in the record. I now recognize myself for an opening statement. I'd like to thank our witnesses for being with us today, and I very much look forward to an important discussion focused on the National Flood Insurance Program with special emphasis on mitigation efforts and multiple lost properties. The National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP, was established in 1968 in response to repeated flood disasters that resulted in the need for federal disaster relief. At the time, Congress felt the NFIP could make flood insurance coverage more widely available at reasonable terms for those who needed it. NFIP is the primary source of flood insurance coverage for residential properties across the country. The NFIP is managed by FEMA. It's primarily funded through premiums from policyholders, but premiums charged by the program often do not fully reflect the real flood risk. When premiums from the National Flood Insurance Fund are insufficient to pay claims, the program has authority to borrow from the Treasury. For most of its history, the NFIP borrowed relatively little from the Treasury. However, after a very destructive hurricane season in 2005, Congress increased the borrowing limit for the program to roughly $20 billion to pay claims. Then, after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Congress increased the borrowing limit again to $30.425 billion. The NFIP has continued to accrue debt in the years that have followed. Most recently, the program borrowed $2 billion in additional funds in February 2025, bringing the program's current debt to $22.525 billion. That leaves just $7.9 billion more in borrowing authority before the program has reached its borrowing cap. In order to appreciate what is driving the increasing debt for this program, we need to better understand what is driving the risk within the flood insurance program. During this hearing, we have witnesses prepared to speak on two important factors that affect the program's financial health, multiple loss properties and mitigation. Multiple loss properties are properties that flood repeatedly, often costing NFIP and taxpayers significant money. According to the GAO, as of 2021, unmitigated multiple loss properties made up about 2.5 percent of all NFIP policies, but 48 percent of NFIP claims. We can find some public reporting that tells the story of these properties that repeatedly flood. For example, the Washington Post reported in 2024 that one property in Virginia Beach has flooded an astounding 52 times, including four floods in 2020, two in 2021. The property received payments totaling around $784,000 from the program. I'd like to submit that into the record without objection. The mismatch between the number of these repetitive loss properties covered by the NFIP and the amount of claims paid out to those homes demonstrates a significant structural challenge for the program. While multiple loss properties constitute a significant driver of insurance claims, mitigation is a potential means of limiting flood damage across the country. Methods of mitigation can vary, but in general, there are four main strategies for mitigating risk. Acquisition, elevation, relocation, flood proofing. All of these mitigation tactics can be used to limit flood losses in areas that are otherwise prone to flooding. Any conversation about the future of NFIP will naturally feature some differences of opinion based on regional divides, and that's okay. Whether you're from an area that floods frequently or one that floods rarely, we all have a unified set of goals, and those are we need to abate the flood risk. High flooding risk means more damages for homeowners and more claims and debt is added to the already severely indebted NFIP. And with that, I yield back. I now recognize the ranking member of the subcommittee, Ms. Presley, for four minutes for an opening statement.