Maryland, 19 Other States Sue To Block Trump From Dismantling Disaster Preparation Program

By Alexander Castro, Maryland Matters

July 17, 2025

Maryland joined 19 other states this week in a lawsuit aimed at reversing the Trump administration’s termination of the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, a key disaster mitigation program.

The program, administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, funds state, tribal and local government projects that help fortify people and property against natural disasters, funding things like flood barriers, building reinforcements, wastewater infrastructure improvements or hardened electric grids. The funds can also be used to prepare emergency plans or identify hazards within communities.

FEMA typically covers up to 75% of a project’s cost, although smaller, rural communities can receive up to 90%.

The suit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, said the “wildly successful” program, operating under different names over several decades, has helped communities avoid $150 billion in disaster-related costs. But, in what the states called an illegal move, the administration suspended the BRIC program in April as part of a larger strategy to do away with FEMA.

“BRIC funding was intended to pay for critical flood protection projects in Crisfield and South Baltimore and is now in jeopardy because of the Trump administration’s funding cuts,” Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown said in a statement announcing the suit. “With the deadly flooding we’ve recently seen in New Mexico, North Carolina, and Texas, this is the worst possible time to cut life-saving disaster preparedness funding.”

The suit is co-led by Attorneys General Andrea Joy Campbell of Massachusetts and Nick Brown of Washington. Other states involved in the suit, besides Maryland, are Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.

FEMA cancels $1 billion for flood prevention projects in Chesapeake Bay region

Since opening for applications in 2020, BRIC has funded over 2,000 projects with about $4.5 billion in funds.

In Rhode Island, for example, the University of Rhode Island has been using BRIC money to develop a modeling tool for flood risks in the state’s coastal and inland waters. The project had been awarded $976,488 across multiple BRIC grants, but a $348,978 grant for one project is threatened by the BRIC termination, the lawsuit said.

“URI’s BRIC project cannot move forward without BRIC funding,” the lawsuit reads. “As a result of the termination of the BRIC program, Rhode Island will have less data and information regarding inland flooding and inland flood risk.”

In Maryland, $36 million awarded last year under BRIC toward a comprehensive flood mitigation project for low-lying Crisfield. The loss of that money “puts Crisfield’s entire flood mitigation project at risk, since many of the non-federal resources the city leveraged to meet its expected federal cost-share responsibilities required the city to have a comprehensive funding plan in place,” that included federal funds, the lawsuit says.

The Chesapeake Bay Journal estimated that ending the BRIC program may have affected as much as $1 billion in projects across the six states in the bay watershed, including $32 million to restore wetlands along the Patapsco River’s Middle Branch near Baltimore.

The lawsuit alleges that BRIC’s suspension violates the separation of powers as well as the Administrative Procedure Act. Lawsuits against the Trump administration over funding cuts have frequently employed similar arguments.

“The President understands that he and his Administration do not have the power to unilaterally withhold Congressionally allocated funding to the states, and yet here we are again,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said in a statement on the suit.

The lawsuit also argues that the elimination of BRIC defies the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. The official who ended the program — Cameron Hamilton, who served as acting administrator of FEMA from January until his firing in May — “was never nominated to serve as FEMA Administrator, nor was he confirmed by the Senate,” according to the suit.

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FEMA, which is itself an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, did not immediately return a request for comment about the lawsuit Wednesday. The agency posted a notice about the program’s termination to its website on April 4, although the link now returns a “Page not found” error as of this writing.

A cached version of the memo stored on Archive.org reads, “The BRIC program was yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program. It was more concerned with political agendas than helping Americans affected by natural disasters.”

An April 16 memo clarified that FEMA would cancel applications for the 2024 funding cycle, as well as all BRIC projects not yet obligated from fiscal years 2020 through 2023, and annul obligated projects yet to begin construction. Unspent funds, which FEMA cited at over $3.6 billion, would be returned to the Disaster Relief Fund. The advisory noted that FEMA would craft a new mitigation strategy that is “more responsive to state and local requirements.”

Wednesday’s lawsuit claims that the abrupt termination of funding “has caused serious harm” as states are not able to move forward with projects and will end up wasting time, effort and money.

“Each day that passes causes more harm and increases the chances that these projects will not be able to go forward, as communities face expiring permits, escalating costs, and eroding stakeholder trust,” the suit reads.

FEMA’s efforts to harden communities against disaster began with pilot programs in the late 1990s, and were formalized in 2002 with the Pre-Disaster Mitigation program, which also offered subsidies for mitigation. In response to Hurricane Katrina a year prior, Congress passed legislation in 2006 that furthered mitigation funding as one of FEMA’s key functions. In 2018, legislation reformed FEMA offerings to make them more consistent, and in September 2020, the first applications for the BRIC program opened.