The Vice Chair of the Subcommittee That Oversees the Home Insurance Industry Has Failed to Act While Texans Pay More for Less and Most Remain Unprotected From Flooding
WASHINGTON, DC – Hurricane Isaias made landfall hundreds of miles from Houston, but Texas homeowners are already bracing for the bill. Insurance experts warn that the storm, which battered Florida and Alabama, could mean higher deductibles and out-of-pocket costs for Texas families when their next policy period begins. One Texas homeowner told KPRC his deductible had climbed past $17,000, so high that he paid for a $19,000 roof replacement himself rather than file a claim.
Hurricane Isaias is the latest blow in a crisis that has been building for years. Texas home insurance premiums have climbed 79% since 2020, and the state’s own data show the average premium nearly doubled from $1,791 in 2016 to $3,506 in 2025. Rice University’s Kinder Institute found premiums now consume 4.6% of median household income in the typical Texas county, up from 2.9% in 2009, with lower-income families hit hardest. Texans’ home insurance costs keep skyrocketing while vice chair of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Housing and Insurance Republican Representative Monica De La Cruz failed to act and actively made it worse.
Her constituents are paying the price. McAllen, in her district, has one of the highest rate of uninsured homes of any U.S. metro area, at 41.5%. A former State Farm agent, De La Cruz has collected nearly $50,000 from property insurers and industry associations and co-sponsored industry-backed legislation that would make it harder for homeowners to challenge claim denials. That matters in a state where nearly half of all homeowner claims in 2024 were closed without any payment.
“Texas families are paying more for less coverage every year, and now a hurricane that never touched Texas soil is set to raise their deductibles. Rep. De La Cruz is a leader on the very subcommittee that oversees the National Flood Insurance Program, yet she has let it stumble from one short-term patch to the next while most Texans have no flood coverage at all,” said Jayson O’Neill, spokesperson for Unlocking America’s Future. “The McAllen Metro area, which is part of her own district, has the highest rate of uninsured homes in the country, but instead of working on behalf of her constituents, the former home insurance agent has spent her time protecting the same insurance industry funding her campaigns, while voting for disastrous cuts to FEMA and NOAA programs Texans count on to reduce risks and when disaster strikes. Texans can’t afford another bill because of Rep. De La Cruz’s inaction.”
Texans know the cost of going without flood coverage. The Hill Country flash floods last year killed more than 130 people and caused as much as $22 billion in damage, yet the National Flood Insurance Program paid out just $135 million because so few Texans carry flood insurance. In South Texas, fewer than 2% of homeowners have flood coverage.
That gap is national, and Congress can fix it yet Rep. De La Cruz has refused to act. A new Government Accountability Office analysis found 86% of high-risk properties have no flood insurance, and FEMA’s floodplain maps miss about 13 million high-risk properties. Families counting on federal disaster aid are badly exposed: FEMA assistance has averaged about $3,500 per homeowner over the last decade, compared with $88,700 in average NFIP claim payments. GAO laid out four fixes to expand coverage, including raising NFIP’s $250,000 coverage cap and making property-level flood risk public. Every one requires action from Congress.
Instead, Rep. De La Cruz and the Republican-controlled Congress has kept the program limping along. The NFIP has not had a long-term reauthorization since 2012, and Congress has only passed short-term extension after extension. The latest stopgap expires December 11.
Few members of Congress are better positioned to fix flood insurance than Rep. Monica De La Cruz (TX-15). She vice chairs the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Housing and Insurance, which has jurisdiction over the NFIP. Yet a reauthorization and reform bill introduced in September 2025 has sat in committee for more than a year without advancing. Over three years in her leadership role, the subcommittee has held only two hearings on home insurance, and neither called insurance executives to testify.
De La Cruz has also backed cuts that leave Texans more exposed before and after storms. She has voted to cut FEMA disaster relief funding, and like every Texas Republican in Congress, she voted for Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which repealed funding for NOAA’s atmospheric research and weather forecasting programs. Those are the tools Texans rely on to track hurricanes like Isaias and flash floods like the one that devastated Kerr County. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has withheld $11 billion in FEMA disaster reimbursements owed to 45 states.
Texans are demanding action. In a statewide poll of registered voters, 79% said they would be more likely to support a candidate who sought to reduce home insurance costs, second only to lowering health care prices. Even Gov. Greg Abbott has directed the Texas Department of Insurance to stop insurers from dropping policies based on a home’s age and to ban the use of personal data in setting prices. In Washington, De La Cruz has offered no comparable plan.
If De La Cruz were serious about protecting Texas homeowners, she would immediately use her subcommittee leadership to:
- Pass a long-term, fully funded NFIP reauthorization before the December 11 deadline;
- Enact GAO’s recommendations to raise NFIP coverage limits, update flood maps to reflect real risk, and require flood insurance quotes with federally backed mortgages;
- Restore the FEMA disaster relief and NOAA forecasting funding she and Texas’s Republican delegation voted to cut, and release disaster reimbursements already owed to states;
- Require insurers to disclose profits, investment income, and claim-denial rates alongside every rate-hike request;
- Reject legislation that makes it harder for homeowners to challenge wrongful claim denials; and
- Hold hearings that bring insurance executives to testify on rising deductibles, shrinking coverage, and delay, deny, and defend practices.
Unlocking America’s Future has documented Texas’s home insurance crisis extensively, including a report on De La Cruz’s record of putting the insurance industry ahead of her constituents and a comprehensive fact sheet on Texas’s home insurance crisis with common-sense solutions to lower costs and risks for policyholders.
Email jayson@focalpointstrategygroup.com to set up interviews with ratings, legal, advocacy, and insurance experts or impacted homeowners.
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