With billions of dollars in grants at stake, a Dec. 11 federal court ruling ordering the reinstatement of FEMA’s Building Resilient Communities and Infrastructure program was a victory for supporters of an agency under assault, but the victory may be short-lived. The Trump administration has said it plans to appeal the ruling, according to news reports, while a crucial vote on the future of the agency by a presidentially appointed panel was canceled minutes before it was scheduled to take place on December 11.
In their lawsuit, California, New York, Maryland and 18 other states said the impact of the BRIC program has been devastating, with years of pre-disaster mitigation projects in development suddenly at risk. The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced in April that it would rescind and reallocate funds for project awards that had not yet been distributed, and that the BRIC program would be terminated entirely in the future.
The states said the federal action violated the Administrative Procedure Act as well as the US Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine.
In its ruling, the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts sided with the states, noting that the funds for the BRIC program had been appropriated by Congress. “At the time of each BRIC appropriation, Congress contemplated that FEMA … would dedicate those funds to the BRIC program,” the court said, concluding that redirecting the funds to disaster relief grants violates what Congress intended.
Over the past four years, FEMA has selected nearly 2,000 projects to receive approximately $4.5 billion in BRIC funding nationwide, according to the Maryland attorney general’s office, which notes that Maryland received approximately $80 million between 2020 and 2023 and will be directly affected. The effects are already being felt: A $36 million flood mitigation project in Crisfield, Maryland, has been put on hold indefinitely.
FEMA did not respond to ENR’s request for comment on its appeal plans.
There is no voting on the panel’s recommendations
FEMA itself is facing a major transformation. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has repeatedly called for the elimination of the agency in its current form. On Dec. 10, DHS announced the appointment of Gregg Phillips, who has been a vocal critic of FEMA and gained notoriety in 2016 with his election conspiracy claims, to one of the agency’s top posts, the head of the Office of Response and Recovery, which coordinates the federal, state and tribal response to natural disasters.
A day later, the FEMA Review Board, a Trump-appointed group chaired by Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, abruptly canceled a vote, scheduled for that day, to release its report with recommendations to revamp the agency after multiple news outlets reported that Noem had reduced the document to 20 pages from 160. rescheduled.
Pete Gaynor, who served as FEMA administrator during the first Trump administration, said Dec. 15 during a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace webinar that the council had put “a lot of due diligence into the report and it would be the North Star in some ways.”
The report is the culmination of input based on several months of full panel and separate meetings with US state and local leaders. Panel members include Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), Fla., and Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management.
According to news first reported by CNN, the review board recommended elevating FEMA to a cabinet-level agency, reducing FEMA staff by up to 50 percent, shifting public assistance reimbursement to community block grants and privatizing the National Flood Insurance Program.
Gaynor expressed skepticism that the flood insurance program could be privatized, because insurance companies won’t want to cover the most at-risk properties, which are the types of properties most often covered through the NFIP, he said. “It’s very difficult to say we’re just going to pass NFIP to the private sector. I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
Central elements of the leaked report’s recommendations are similar to the legislation passed by lawmakers in the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on Sept. 3 in a bipartisan vote of 57-3, advancing the bill to the House floor.
Major reform is possible by using the council’s draft as a starting point and tying key elements of it to the House legislation, suggested Danielle Aymond, a Baker Donelson attorney who focuses on disaster recovery and emergency management cases. “I think we can hit the gas and before hurricane season, we can have completely reformed the system through this vehicle,” he said during the Carnegie Endowment webinar.
More than 80 natural disaster survivors were in Washington, DC on December 15-16 to push for passage of the House bill, which currently has 40 cosponsors: 24 Republicans and 16 Democrats. TJ Ware, an incident commander for United Disaster Relief, a non-profit disaster survivor advocacy organization, told ENR that he is encouraged based on the commitments made by lawmakers. “Overall, the reception on the Hill suggests real movement and a growing understanding that meaningful FEMA reform is needed and overdue,” he said.
