President Donald Trump is facing a major lawsuit from 20 states after his administration abruptly shut down a key infrastructure program designed to protect communities from natural disasters.
The states filed the lawsuit Wednesday in federal court in Boston, slamming the Trump administration for killing FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructures and Communities (BRIC) program — a multibillion-dollar grant fund aimed at helping states prepare for floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters before they strike.
“This decision has been devastating,” the lawsuit states.
“Communities across the country are being forced to delay, scale back, or cancel hundreds of mitigation projects depending on this funding,” the complaint continues. “Projects that have been in development for years, and in which communities have invested millions of dollars for planning, permitting, and environmental review are now threatened.”
The BRIC program was launched in 2018 and built on decades of federal efforts to shift from simply reacting to disasters to actively preparing for them. According to the lawsuit, BRIC and similar FEMA programs have saved taxpayers over $150 billion in avoided disaster costs.
Despite that track record, the Trump administration shut down BRIC in April, calling it “wasteful” and “politicized.”
The states argue that FEMA didn’t have the authority to eliminate the program and say the move overstepped Congress’s constitutional role.
