The Federal Emergency Management Agency said Wednesday it would relaunch a canceled grant program that had helped states invest billions of dollars in projects that made local communities more resilient to floods, fires and other disasters.
The announcement came days ahead of a deadline imposed by a federal judge who ruled in December that the Trump administration’s decision to end the program, known as Building Resilient Communities and Infrastructure, or BRIC, last April was illegal. In a March 6 court order, Judge Richard G. Stearns of U.S. District Court for Massachusetts gave FEMA two weeks to comply with his ruling and reinstate the program.
FEMA’s announcement on Wednesday did not mention the ruling. The agency said officials were reviving the grant program — which FEMA created during President Trump’s first administration — after completing an evaluation. It concluded that under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the program had become too “focused on ‘climate change,’” but that the Trump administration would “reconstitute the BRIC program in a way that reflects good stewardship of taxpayer money,” the announcement said.
The court ruling was a victory for 22 states that had sued the Trump administration seeking to have the grant program reinstated, citing laws regarding federal spending and FEMA’s statutory mission to help prevent disaster damage.
When the lawsuit was filed in July, New Jersey’s Democratic attorney general at the time, Matthew J. Platkin, said the loss of the grants was “making it much harder for communities across our state to protect themselves against future extreme weather events and putting lives at risk.” The program was designed to help states prepare for disasters, rather than react to them, as rising global temperatures render many weather extremes more severe and frequent.
The grants had invested roughly $4.5 billion in projects such as sea walls and drainage improvements to prevent flooding; brush clearance and evacuation planning in case of wildfires; and improvements to public buildings to help them withstand hurricanes, tornadoes or earthquakes. In their lawsuit, the states estimated that the grants and similar investments predating the program had prevented $150 billion in disaster damage over two decades.
In canceling the program last year, FEMA officials said it “was yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program.”
On Wednesday, though, they said the agency “remains deeply committed to supporting hazard mitigation work and looks forward to working with communities across the nation to move critical resiliency projects forward.”
The judge’s order also gave FEMA three weeks to issue a notice of funding opportunity so that states could begin preparing applications for the grant program. The agency’s announcement said that would be coming some time “in the weeks and months ahead.”
Scott Dance is a Times reporter who covers how climate change and extreme weather are transforming society.
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