The 2006 hurricane season was far more benign than predicted, but it may have done serious damage to efforts to salvage the floundering National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP).

When the soon-to-be reconstituted Congress adjourned two weeks ago, a bill to overhaul the National Flood Insurance program, whose debt to the U.S. Treasury is $17.3 billion, died in a Senate committee. So did virtually every other funding bill designed to keep the government functioning for the next nine months; in a remarkable display of petulance the lame duck legislature walked away from its primary budgetary responsibilities.

“It’s amazing,” said J. Robert Hunter, a former NFIP director and now an insurance expert for the Consumer Federation of America. “It’s such a broken program, and (lawmakers) knew it.”

NFIP is another star in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s firmament. NFIP sells insurance that private firms long ago abandoned – with good reason. Some of America’s most flood-endangered properties are among the $800 billion in assets that the program insures for more than five million policyholders nationwide. About $50 billion of that property is in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

The program’s flaws include heavily subsidized rates, dangerously antiquated maps of floodplains, and staggering losses paid on structures that are swamped repeatedly. Claims on one Philadelphia-area property, which FEMA has declined to identify, have been filed 22 times.

We’ve all heard about the operators of shaky businesses enjoying comfortable retirements after an unfortunate fire razed the business and fire insurance covered the losses. Now apparently, FEMA’s management has made it possible for the faltering businessman in America to start a flood as well.