A coalition of states — including New York and New Jersey, which just experienced flash flooding that killed two — are suing the Trump administration over its abrupt cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars of natural disaster preparedness funding.
The coalition of 19 Democratic attorneys general and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency of violating “core separation of powers principles” by canceling funding for disaster resilience that had been directed by Congress and already awarded by FEMA to the states.
The lawsuit comes just weeks after devastating floods killed more than 100 people in Kerr County, Texas, and during a 2025 summer that has been drenched by a record-breaking 1,200 reports of floods across the country, more than double the average.
“This administration’s decision to slash billions of dollars that protect our communities from floods, wildfires, and other disasters puts millions of New Yorkers at risk,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James in a statement, just two days after record-breaking rainfall and flash-flooding filled the city’s subways with rushing water. “New Yorkers depend on quality roads, floodwalls, and other vital infrastructure to keep them safe when disaster strikes.”
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New York City was a finalist for two $50 million disaster resilience grants that would have been used to address flooding dangers in some of the city’s highest-risk neighborhoods. The city’s transportation department was also named a finalist in the fall of 2024 for nearly $1 million to conduct a flood risk assessment through a different but related FEMA program — Flood Mitigation Assistance — but still has not heard back from the agency about that grant’s future.
In total, the city was expecting more than $351 million in federal grant funding to fund 19 different projects that had been awarded or finalized between 2020 and 2024, almost all of them flood-mitigation related, Mayor Eric Adams’ office said in a press release.
FEMA abruptly canceled the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program in April, calling it “wasteful.” Hundreds of communities lost access to either ongoing or future funding for mitigation projects, many of them directed at reducing flood mitigation specifically. The program is hugely popular — in the last fiscal year, states applied for more than 1,200 projects worth $5.4 billion, when FEMA only had $1 billion in funds available to award.
FEMA intends to return about $800 million intended for BRIC to the U.S. Treasury, a spokesperson previously said to NOTUS. FEMA did not immediately respond to request for comment about the lawsuit.
“In the wake of devastating flooding in Texas and other states, it’s clear just how critical federal resources are in helping states prepare for and respond to natural disasters,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell. “By abruptly and unlawfully shutting down the BRIC program, this administration is abandoning states and local communities that rely on federal funding to protect their residents and, in the event of disaster, save lives.”
The Trump administration has systematically reduced the country’s disaster preparedness resources, not only slashing the BRIC program but also holding back other FEMA disaster mitigation funding and relaxing regulations intended to help strengthen critical infrastructure in the face of future disasters.
State and local officials across the country — including in communities that overwhelmingly voted for Trump — have been left in the lurch, suddenly without the funds to pay for planned infrastructure designed to protect Americans against major weather events, as NOTUS reported this week.
“Communities across the country are being forced to delay, scale back, or cancel hundreds of mitigation projects depending on this funding. 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 AGs wrote in the suit. “And in the meantime, Americans across the country face a higher risk of harm from natural disasters.”
The suit lists projects that states had already begun to build and are now missing critical funding to complete, as well as planned projects that would prevent future disasters but now do not have a source of funding.
In Washington state, for example, rural coastal communities had already spent more than $30 million to prepare to build new levees to stop regular, dangerous flooding — now that money will likely be wasted without the BRIC grant, the suit alleges.
The city of Salisbury, North Carolina, had already spent $3 million to relocate a drinking water facility away from future flooding contamination — but FEMA withdrew the $21 million grant that would have allowed for the project to actually be constructed, according to the lawsuit.
And in Pennsylvania, $10 million awarded in 2022 would have been used to protect more than 20,000 people from repeated floods in York and Allegheny counties, according to the lawsuit.
The suit lists more than 20 other planned projects in various stages of planning across the country that are now in limbo.
“Plaintiffs bring this lawsuit to compel FEMA to reverse the unlawful termination of the BRIC program so that communities across the country can resume this critical work,” the attorneys general wrote in the suit.
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This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and The City.
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