Brian Shay, the administrator for the small city of Hoquiam, Wash., was waiting for a bus in Disney World when he received the worst news of his career.
He had been nervous for weeks that the cuts coming from Washington, D.C., would endanger a project he’d spent the last seven years getting off the ground — 12 miles of levees that would protect his coastal community from flooding.
Hoquiam is a city of about 8,700 people in Grays Harbor County, a foggy stretch of pine trees and sea gulls that was once the capital of the American logging industry. The area has flooded for as long as anybody can remember. The large harbor on the county’s southern coast overflows in heavy rains or particularly high tides, making messes in basements and prompting the federal government years ago to declare parts of the area a flood zone.
About seven years ago, Mr. Shay, a third-generation Harborite, was among a group of local officials who decided that enough was enough.
They competed for, and won, $85 million in federal money to build the levee project, beginning in Donald J. Trump’s first term. When he was re-elected, the money did not seem to be at risk. But once the administration got up and running — and began cutting, prolifically — Mr. Shay started to worry.
“We asked on every call, you know, ‘Is there any issue? Anything to worry about here?’” he said in his office in Hoquiam last month. “We were constantly told, ‘Nope, nope. It’s not at risk.’”
So he kept working on it. On March 27, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which gave the grant, finally finished a painstaking environmental review that had taken about four years. It was the last step before the agency would actually release the funds.
That same day, Mr. Shay flew to Orlando, Fla., with his wife and 9-year-old son for spring break. On the last day of his vacation, he checked his phone for work messages, and said it exploded with voice mails, texts and emails: “And then I’m like, ‘What in the world?’”
The news came in a statement from the Department of Homeland Security. Under the new secretary, Kristi Noem, the department said it was eliminating waste and fraud, and that the grant program funding Hoquiam’s levees was “more concerned with political agendas than helping Americans affected by natural disasters.” And just like that, the financial motor of the entire project came to a stop.
“My first reaction was, ‘Oh, man, this is just the worst news you could ever get,’” said Mr. Shay, 56, a Grays Harbor native. He had returned after moving to Seattle for college because he wanted to help improve the place where he grew up. “It just felt like being stabbed in the heart,” he said.
Grays Harbor is a red county in a blue state, but no one there considered the levee project to be political. On the contrary, it was a basic piece of public infrastructure created in a remarkable act of common purpose: Two city councils and two Native American tribes, Democrats and Republicans had worked together to create it.
Now the county has joined the ranks of communities nationwide that are puzzling over what to do about cuts the Trump administration made to projects and programs that no one imagined would be in danger. Town administrators are trying to determine whether the money is paused, rerouted through other programs or gone for good — and if it is gone, what to do to replace it.
“It’d be one thing if we have to wait a couple years, but I just really hope that it isn’t just cut and lost,” said Mr. Shay, whose administrator position is nonpartisan. “This is something we want, I want personally, so bad. We all want desperately.”
Under water
The levee project had widespread support in Grays Harbor, not just because people didn’t want to be swept away in a flood. Without it, the area’s sleepy economy might never wake up.
Anyone getting a mortgage in the flood zone — most of Hoquiam and its larger neighbor, Aberdeen — had to buy flood insurance, which can cost thousands of dollars a year. And major renovations can require expensive flood-proofing measures, like raising a building off the ground for a new foundation. Both towns were already hurting from declines in the timber industry, and the flood zone was another drag on development. Both have mostly empty downtown storefronts.
The levee would eliminate those requirements for a vast majority of both cities, and, the thinking went, help open the door to economic development.
Michelle Simon Conrad experienced firsthand the cost of doing business in the flood zone. She moved to Aberdeen the year Mr. Trump was first elected, and bought a used-book store that was renting space in a mall. When the mall closed suddenly, she had two weeks to move. She eventually bid on an aging burlesque theater with some roof damage.
Ms. Conrad was ready to close on the building when the bank asked her for her flood insurance policy. She didn’t think much of it. How much could it possibly cost? But then the quote came back from her insurance broker.
“She said, ‘It’s $30,000,’” Ms. Conrad recalled. “I said, ‘Lifetime?’ She said, ‘A year.’ I said, ‘You’re kidding.’”
The sum, she said, was more than her annual mortgage.
“I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “I called Tony at Bank of Pacific, who is my loan officer, and I said, ‘Tony, what am I going to do?’”
Eventually she found a cheaper policy but at $4,500 a year, the cost still feels oppressive.
The levee would have been a welcome relief, but Ms. Conrad said it was not her main worry. Her store, Tectonic Comics, a place for young people to play games, is stacked with collectible figurines, board games and trading cards — much of it made in China.
“My fear at night now is the tariffs,” she said.
Most of all, Ms. Conrad is mad at President Trump for what she said are cuts that are making life harder for the people who are least able to manage. Last year, a young woman was living in the store’s parking lot, a casualty of the area’s drug epidemic. A couple is living there now. One of them, Ms. Conrad said, is a veteran. She said cuts to federal funding have reduced food bank supplies for all of them.
“People are in really bad shape,” she said. “It’s burning. The country is burning.”
Dead or delayed?
The levee project had bipartisan support, but now the question of whether the funding will be reinstated is a Rorschach test for politics. Ms. Conrad did not expect the money to come back, and said she did not understand the Trump supporters in her life who did, like her ex-husband.
“He told me last night on the phone, ‘You know he’s just pushing the money down to the states, he’s just letting the states handle it,’” she said. “I’m like, ‘No, Del, he cut the program. He’s not sending the money!’”
In 2016, Mr. Trump turned the county red for the first time since 1928, and it has stayed that way. Many here, including Hoquiam’s mayor, Ben Winkelman, voted for him. Mr. Winkelman’s first thought when he heard the news was that he should travel to Washington, D.C., to talk to the president directly.
If he could just have “a normal conversation about what’s going on,” he could get some reassurance, something to say to the people who voted for him.
“I would like to tell him that we elected him three times for a reason, and that there is hope and inspiration about some of the projects that he placed in this area,” Mr. Winkelman said in his law office, which once belonged to a lumber baron in Hoquiam. “But we really need to see this through because far too many times over the last 100 years the government has let us down.”
That letdown was part of a deeper story in Grays Harbor, one that Mr. Winkelman himself lived through. He grew up in a logging camp about 40 miles from Hoquiam. His mother was a teacher, his father a logger. The camp was big enough for a two-lane bowling alley and a newspaper, which he delivered after printing it on a mimeograph on his family’s kitchen table. But by 1985, the economics and politics had changed, and the camp was slated for closure. Mr. Winkelman said men came in to remove the town, even the roads.
“I watched them take chain saws and take our houses out,” he said. “When they were done with that, they scraped out all the roads. As if nothing ever existed. To me, the entire community was lost.”
Mr. Winkelman recalled his family struggling as his father tried a government-sponsored training program to find a new job, but the funding quickly ran out. He remembers his parents bringing home subsidized blocks of cheddar cheese. He eventually made it to law school, and found the community he’d been looking for in Hoquiam, a town that was plagued by many of the same problems that had dogged his family.
“I just thought, Well, I can help people who are struggling and trying to get their business going,” he said. “Or people that lost everything.” He said that for a lot of people, it felt like everything was out of their control.
One of the ways to help was the levee project. Mr. Winkelman had just been elected mayor when the funding for the project was won in 2020. It came from a federal program called Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC. The program’s funding was small by federal standards, but it was a rare effort to prepare for disasters before they happen to try to bring down the costs of recovery. Mr. Trump signed the legislation it came from into law in 2018.
The levee was just one of the reasons Mr. Winkelman was excited about Mr. Trump. He liked that his administration had established zones that offered tax breaks in exchange for investments in his area. Mr. Trump’s brash negotiating techniques fascinated Mr. Winkelman. He read “The Art of the Deal” and a financial self-help book called “Rich Dad Poor Dad,” whose author collaborated with Mr. Trump.
“I appreciated the fact that this guy can really negotiate,” Mr. Winkelman said. “I wanted to watch him do that. And I felt like he would do that on behalf of the citizens.”
Mr. Winkelman thinks the levee project was caught in the crossfire between FEMA and those in the Trump administration who want to dismantle the agency.
“I think we kind of got taken out at the knees as a consequence of other politics,” he said.
He believes the money will be reinstated, possibly administered by another agency.
The Trump question
One open question in Mr. Trump’s second term has been whether the effects from economic decisions like cuts to programs or tariffs might sour Republicans on his presidency. The answer in Grays Harbor County, at least so far, is no. Many Republicans interviewed here believed the money would eventually be reinstated after a closer analysis of FEMA spending.
Jim Walsh, a state representative and the chairman of the Republican Party in Washington State, bristled at the question.
“Don’t be fishing for places that voted for Trump getting hurt by Trump,” said Mr. Walsh, who lives in Aberdeen. “If that’s the narrative theme you’re going with, I think you’re missing the boat on what’s happening.”
He said the money was paused, not canceled, and that he’d been in touch with Secretary Noem’s staff about it.
“FEMA’s a mess and they need to do a lot of reform,” he said. “I completely understand that the administration wants to look at some of those more questionable projects. This is not one of those.”
Republicans said they liked the fact that Mr. Trump was cutting spending, even if the way he was going about it might seem a little rough.
“A broad disappointment in Trump? I don’t think that exists here among Republicans,” said Rick Hole, a county commissioner and a Republican. “I think there’s a general happiness because we’re taking a harder look at spending.”
Mr. Hole said most people he knew remained optimistic that the money for the project would eventually be reinstated.
And they might be right. On May 12, dozens of U.S. Representatives and Senators sent a letter to the administration asking for the BRIC funding to be reinstated. Sarah Labowitz, a FEMA expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said she was surprised at how much support there had been, especially among prominent Republicans. “People have been coming out of the woodwork to support this program,” she said.
But as more time passes, the more worried Mr. Shay has become. On May 9, FEMA’s acting head was fired, prompting more upheaval in the agency’s leadership. Mr. Shay is beginning to think about how to move forward without the money, to build a smaller portion of the levee with money from the state.
Mr. Winkelman, for his part, is frustrated with not knowing.
“I mostly want to be able to tell my constituents that this isn’t over and we can make it work,” he said. “Just tell us!”
But he does not blame Mr. Trump.
“If I thought he did this on purpose, then yeah,” he said. “But I don’t think this was his intent.”
Ruth Fremson is a Times photographer, based in Seattle, who covers stories nationally and internationally.
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