No one seriously expects the program to make good on what it owes. Ever. (For years, California Representative Maxine Waters has been pushing to have the debt forgiven.) The Government Accountability Office has listed NFIP among the programs and agencies on its “High Risk List” since 2006. As the frequency of high-dollar floods grows, so do the losses. Throw in spiraling interest payments—$400 million last year alone—and one can see why the program could use a bit of fixing.

The structural, some even say moral, flaws of NFIP are vast and varied. Roughly one out of five properties pays premiums too low for the risks involved. (That situation is slowly improving thanks to past reforms, though some contend that even “full-risk” rates are insufficient.) “Grandfathered” properties that for whatever reason are reclassified into a higher-risk zone also enjoy artificially low rates, subsidized by other policyholders in the area. Flood-zone maps are outdated and inadequate, leading to shoddy risk assessment. Subsidies are “hidden” within policy premiums, making it hard for consumers to gauge a property’s real risk. The way rates are set—based on average home prices within a zone, not the cost of individual structures—leads to cross-subsidies of rich property owners by poor ones. “Repetitive loss” properties make up around 1 percent of policies but account for 30 percent of payouts. And there are substantial barriers to private insurers entering the market.

On and on the list goes. The end result: An irrational system that encourages people to hunker down in areas where Mother Nature clearly does not want them. It is, critics argue, completely bonkers.

“The most basic purpose of government going back millennia is to protect its citizenry,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of the nonpartisan budget-watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. “But here you have a program that is subsidizing people to live and develop in harm’s way.”

Ellis is not alone in his frustration. His group is part of a nonpartisan coalition called SmarterSafer that has been championing NFIP reform for a decade. Other participants include the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club, the National Housing Conference, Habitat for Humanity, the National Taxpayers Union, and multiple insurance giants.

While the coalition pushes a range of reforms, among its overarching goals is to shift NFIP’s focus away from rate subsidies and toward mitigation efforts. In other words, instead of making it cheaper for people to live in high-risk zones, government should work to lower those risks, either by helping owners seriously flood-proof their homes or by easing them out of an area altogether.

Indeed, among NFIP’s core insanities is that it’s geared to help people rebuild in the same spot where they’ve already been flooded. As the Natural Resources Defense Council noted in a report last August, this is “a perilous strategy in the face of increasingly severe storms and sea-level rise due to climate change.” This holds doubly true of repetitive-loss properties, few of whose owners seem to learn from past disasters. Of 30,000 repetitive-loss properties examined by the NRDC, 75 percent had done nothing to mitigate future risk. The general public favors a new approach as well: An April poll commissioned by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 75 percent of registered voters support FEMA buyouts of “repeatedly flooded homes in environmentally sensitive areas.”