The National Flood Insurance Program is nearly broke, and just at the worst possible time.
The U.S. government’s 49-year-old flood-insurance program is about $25 billion in debt, with just $1.7 billion of cash and $5.8 billion of borrowing capacity. And that’s before claims start coming in from Hurricane Harvey, which has flooded parts of the Texas coast with more than four feet of rain over the past week and caused devastating flooding in and around Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city.
