Fire-affected residents meet with FEMA officials on Jan. 14, 2025 in Pasadena, California, where a FEMA Disaster Recovery Center opened today to help homeowners, renters, businesses and non-profits with their economic recovery.
Frederic J. Brown | AFP | Getty Images
A group of 20 mostly Democrat-led U.S. states filed a lawsuit on Wednesday seeking to block the Trump administration from terminating a multibillion-dollar grant program that funds infrastructure upgrades to protect against natural disasters.
The lawsuit filed in Boston federal court claims that the Federal Emergency Management Agency lacked the power to cancel the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program in April after it was approved and funded by Congress.
FEMA, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, has come under scrutiny for its response to deadly floods in Texas earlier this month, which has put renewed focus on the administration’s moves to shrink or abolish the agency.
“By unilaterally shutting down FEMA’s flagship pre-disaster mitigation program, Defendants have acted unlawfully and violated core separation of powers principles,” said the states, led by Washington and Massachusetts.
FEMA and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The BRIC program, created in 2018 as an upgrade of existing grant programs, covers up to 75% of the costs of infrastructure projects, or 90% in rural areas, meant to protect communities from natural disasters. The funding has been used for evacuation shelters, flood walls and improvements to roads and bridges, among other projects.
Over the past four years FEMA has approved roughly $4.5 billion in grants for nearly 2,000 projects, much of which went to coastal states, according to Tuesday’s lawsuit.
When FEMA announced the termination of the program in April, the agency said it had been wasteful, ineffective and politicized.
