In DePue, Ill., sewage will keep backing up into people's basements when there's heavy rain. In Rising Sun, Md., a mobile home park that has already flooded six times will remain in harm's way. And in Kamiah, Idaho, houses won't get upgrades that would protect them from wildfires
These rural communities were awarded grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to fix long-standing infrastructure problems, and they expected funding to be delivered this year. But last month, the Trump administration canceled their grants and hundreds of others, including ones that had already been promised but not yet paid out.
Since 2020, FEMA has awarded about $4.6 billion to communities across the U.S. through a program known as Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC). The goal was to help local, state and tribal governments protect residents from future disasters such as floods, wildfires, tornadoes and hurricanes.
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Those disasters are becoming costlier, with the country experiencing increasing numbers of events with billion-dollar price tags as climate change drives more extreme weather. Research shows that improving buildings and infrastructure before disasters happen can reduce the overall damage and cost when they hit.
"Programs like BRIC really help us avoid these ballooning disaster costs that we've seen, by simply being more proactive," says Kristin Smith, a researcher who studies disaster funding at Headwaters Economics, a think tank that studies development and land management decisions. "We pay a little now or a lot tomorrow."
The BRIC grant program was established during President Trump's first term and was dramatically expanded by Congress in 2021. Now, the Trump administration has ended it, describing the spending as "ineffective" in a FEMA statement that also says the cuts are part of "eliminating waste, fraud and abuse."
"I don't think they know what waste is," says Daniel Hoffert, village president for DePue, which lost a grant to stop chronic flooding problems. "I don't think they know what fraud is. None of this, to me, is waste and fraud."
Rural communities are hit particularly hard by the lost funds
Many small, rural communities applied for federal money because they have no other option. For many, federal funding is the only source large enough to update the aging infrastructure that's vulnerable to increasingly intense disasters.
The town of Rising Sun has about 2,800 residents. It's just upstream from the Chesapeake Bay and is crisscrossed by creeks that have repeatedly flooded, endangering residents in a mobile home park and causing the sewage treatment plant to release contaminated water.
But moving residents to higher ground and upgrading the sewage plant costs tens of millions of dollars that the town doesn't have. "You know, not everyone is wealthy," says Calvin Bonenberger Jr., the longtime town administrator in Rising Sun. The local government collects only about $1 million in property tax revenue each year, he says.
The solution was to apply for federal money, even though Bonenberger says federal involvement in local projects isn't always popular in the heavily conservative area. And Rising Sun was well positioned to win money, despite steep competition from other towns across the country. That's because FEMA developed equity policies to prioritize helping places that had no alternative source of funding, such as rural towns and communities with lower average incomes.
Last year, FEMA awarded Rising Sun two grants for a total of about $5 million.
With the money promised, Bonenberger was making concrete plans to move residents out of the flood zone and start fixing the wastewater plant. Now, with the grants canceled, the town is back to square one.
Bonenberger is frustrated. "This is dangerous," he says. When it rains, volunteer firefighters in town have to rescue people from the low-lying mobile homes. "We are sitting here with the possibility of 10 to 15 trailers being negatively impacted. And volunteer firefighters who give up their lives for the community. What, becoming electrocuted? Drowning?" he argues. "So why can't we put the horse in front of the cart? It's avoidable."
An ounce of prevention
Rising Sun is just one of hundreds of communities that were counting on a FEMA grant.
"There's no way that any small community could afford to do anything without some government aid to help them," says Hoffert, of DePue. "There's just too much expense."
FEMA's BRIC program was designed to fill the gap that small communities face. When a disaster hits, the federal government pays for the majority of the damage, including rebuilding public infrastructure like roads and schools, as well as helping individuals who lost their homes. In the face of those escalating costs, BRIC was established during Trump's first term to help communities prepare their infrastructure and lessen the damage.
"FEMA is excited about BRIC's potential to help communities proactively reduce their vulnerability to natural hazard events, and in turn, make the nation more resilient," read a FEMA statement when the Trump administration announced the program in 2020.
Studies show preparing for disasters ahead of time can mean significant savings. For every $1 invested in preparation, between $4 and $11 is avoided in losses, according to a report from the National Institute of Building Sciences, a nonprofit research group.
More than $4.6 billion in BRIC grants have been awarded since 2020, including to schools seeking to build tornado shelters and to tribal nations for emergency management plans. Only 1.3% of that funding has been paid out to communities so far, according to an analysis by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It can take years for communities to do the planning, engineering and paperwork required by FEMA to receive funds.
FEMA says projects that have already started construction will continue to get funding, but the majority of grants are being canceled. The agency expects approximately $882 million to be returned to the U.S. Treasury, and $3.6 billion will be allocated for disaster response costs.
The Trump administration is pushing states to take on more of the nation's disaster preparedness, though many states say they're unprepared to do so. Disaster experts say underinvesting in improving the country's infrastructure will simply lead to bigger costs in the long run, especially as storms, hurricanes and wildfires get more intense as the climate gets hotter.
"Disasters strike every community," Smith says. "There's risk everywhere, and without these federal investments in prevention, we're stuck in this cycle of really expensive disaster bill-outs. And those costs fall on all of us as taxpayers."
Years of planning comes to a halt
Hoffert spent years looking for a way to fix the DePue sewage treatment plant. It was built in a low-lying area, so heavy rainstorms inundate the facility with floodwater, shutting it down. This causes sewage to back up in the pipes, which means residents in town aren't able to flush their toilets. Hoffert says a recent storm caused flooding in more than 100 homes, some with sewage in their basements.
The village is hoping to build a new wastewater treatment plant on higher ground, costing around $25 million. But for the community of around 1,500 residents, the price tag is out of reach.
"That's more tax money than we'll get in 25 years, maybe 50 years," Hoffert says.
DePue's FEMA BRIC grant of $23 million required that the village match it with $2 million in local funds, which was already going to be a stretch. Hoffert says they've already spent tens of thousands of dollars designing and planning the new treatment plant, believing that the FEMA grant was on its way.
"It was probably within a month or two of being OK, so that's really harsh," he says of the grant money that DePue awaited. "If you don't do anything for small communities in this country, they're just going to get washed away."
Searching for new sources of funding
Now, many small, rural communities are starting an urgent search for other sources of funding. In Kamiah, Idaho, deputy city clerk Mike Tornatore says he'd already told residents that the grant was on its way. With Kamiah having seen destructive wildfires in the past, its BRIC grant focused on fire protection.
"This community, due to the age of it, the building materials that were used at that time, we are ripe for a fire to sweep through this community and burn it to the ground," Tornatore says.
Since Kamiah is a lower-income area, Tornatore says many residents can't afford to prepare their homes for wildfires. That includes cutting down trees and brush around structures, which can spread a wildfire if they ignite, as well as installing fire-resistant roofs and siding, which reduce the chances a house will burn. The FEMA funding would have provided grants for residents who need it, and Tornatore says there were already more requests than he could fund.
"I have 30 people waiting to receive these grants," he says. "But I'll find another way for them. I will. It's what I have to do."
Like many small communities, Kamiah has a limited capacity to do disaster planning and apply for grants. Tornatore already does several jobs for the town but was able to spearhead the wildfire project with help from FEMA's BRIC Direct Technical Assistance program, which provided training on infrastructure planning, risk assessment and community engagement.
Now, he's trying to remain optimistic that the project won't be lost, if he can find funding from the state of Idaho or another source. He's hoping small communities that lost FEMA grants will find ways to strategize together, given limited options without the federal government's help.
He's also hoping to get a meeting with Trump about the impact of what the administration has canceled. Residents in Kamiah's county, like the counties that include DePue and Rising Sun, voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
"I'd just want to educate him about what this means to a rural community," Tornatore says.
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