To help the government of Puerto Rico accelerate recovery from Hurricanes Irma and Maria, RAND researchers examined policy areas important to Puerto Rico’s social, economic, and governance success. This report synthesizes the team’s findings on how Puerto Rico can rebuild as a more robust and resilient society—specifically, in the areas of energy, the economy, health care, education, public safety, and emergency preparedness.

Priority Recommendations for Puerto Rico to Promote Well-Being and Economic Growth

Kyle Siler-Evans, Elvira N. Loredo, Chandra Garber, Keith Crane, Vegard M. Nygaard

ResearchPublished Dec 17, 2025

In 2023, the government of Puerto Rico asked RAND to assess the progress of recovery from Hurricanes Maria and Irma and to provide policy recommendations on how to accelerate that recovery. To respond to this request, RAND researchers examined policy areas important to Puerto Rico’s social, economic, and governance success. These assessments address the pace of recovery and opportunities to rebuild Puerto Rico as a more robust and resilient society. RAND has produced a report for each policy topic that documents the analysis, findings, and recommendations to help Puerto Rico move forward, in addition to a Recovery Tracking Tool. Two reports synthesize the assessment findings. The first focuses on the objective of rebuilding faster and covers recovery-related workforce demands, inflation’s impact on recovery funds, supply chain constraints, and the speed and efficiency of the recovery process. The second synthesis, which is presented in this report, highlights opportunities for Puerto Rico to leverage the recovery effort to rebuild Puerto Rico as a vibrant, resilient society. It focuses specifically on what Puerto Rico can do to rebuild in the areas of energy, the economy, health care, education, public safety, and emergency preparedness.

Key Findings

  • Puerto Rico’s electric power system has not recovered, and the system’s poor performance hurts Puerto Rico’s economy and residents’ well-being. Increasing the speed of recovery in this sector is critical to stave off recovery funding shortfalls and to strengthen the economy.
  • Many other policy sectors in Puerto Rico have returned to predisaster norms but continue to face significant, long-standing challenges that predate the 2017 hurricanes. For example, investments are needed to address ongoing Medicare and Medicaid shortfalls and pay for electronic health record upgrades, to support effective emergency preparedness, and to ensure appropriate public safety staffing levels.
  • Puerto Rico’s public education system is in crisis, with poor student outcomes the norm and a teaching staff that is oversized and unreliable. Difficult reforms will be needed to right-size the system and improve student outcomes, although many important changes do not call for new investment and could offer savings.

Recommendations

  • Prioritize efforts to rebuild the energy sector—in particular, improving grid reliability.
  • Strengthen Puerto Rico’s economy and fiscal position, especially by strengthening its energy sector, to enable enactment of needed reforms in other sectors, including the health care sector.
  • Prioritize long-standing, systemic challenges by right-sizing the public education system to bring student–teacher ratios in line with those in other large U.S. districts.
  • Target efforts for health care funding-formula changes to those that uniquely disadvantage Puerto Rico and that can be accomplished without federal legislative actions.
  • Improve collection and sharing of robust public health data.
  • Work to end the Puerto Rico Police Bureau’s consent decree.
  • Address policies and funding levels that harm recruitment and retention of public safety officials.
  • Shift public safety and emergency management positions from political appointment to career civil service for resilience to political changes.
  • Improve the quality of the emergency preparedness workforce.

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Citation

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Siler-Evans, Kyle, Elvira N. Loredo, Chandra Garber, Keith Crane, and Vegard M. Nygaard, Priority Recommendations for Puerto Rico to Promote Well-Being and Economic Growth. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2025. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2959-30.html.
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This research was sponsored by the Puerto Rico Department of Housing via a grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to the Puerto Rico Department of Housing and conducted in the Disaster Management and Resilience Program of the RAND Homeland Security Research Division.

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