The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) is a program created by the Congress of the United States in 1968 through the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968 (P.L. 90-448). The NFIP has two purposes: to share the risk of flood losses through flood insurance and to reduce flood damages by restricting floodplain development. The program enables property owners in participating communities to purchase insurance protection, administered by the government, against losses from flooding, and requires flood insurance for all loans or lines of credit that are secured by existing buildings, manufactured homes, or buildings under construction, that are located in the Special Flood Hazard Area in a community that participates in the NFIP. U.S. Congress limits the availability of National Flood Insurance to communities that adopt adequate land use and control measures with effective enforcement provisions to reduce flood damages by restricting development in areas exposed to flooding. The NFIP is managed and administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) through the Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration (FIMA). The program is designed to provide an insurance alternative to disaster assistance to meet the escalating costs of repairing damage to buildings and their contents caused by floods. As of August 2017, the program insured about 5 million homes (down from about 5.5 million homes in April 2010), the majority of which are in Texas and Florida. The cost of the insurance program was fully covered by its premiums until the end of 2004, but it has had to steadily borrow funds since, primarily due to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, accumulating $25 billion of debt by August 2017. In October 2017, Congress cancelled $16 billion of NFIP debt, making it possible for the program to pay claims. The NFIP owes $20.525 billion to the U.S. as of December 2020. Floodplain definition The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) defines the floodplain as the area that would be flooded by a base flood, which is "the flood which has a one percent chance of being equaled or exceeded in any given year". In this sense, a base flood is synonymous with a 100-year flood and a floodplain is synonymous with a special flood hazard area. This base flood "is used in the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) to indicate the minimum level of flooding to be used by a community in its floodplain management regulations." FEMA explains regulatory floodplains in some places