Attorney General Anthony G. Brown joined a coalition of 20 states in filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration over its decision to terminate FEMA’s BRIC program, arguing the move violates federal law and jeopardizes critical disaster mitigation projects.
Per the news release distributed on Wednesday, July 16: “Attorney General Anthony G. Brown today joined a coalition of 20 states in suing the Trump administration over its decision to illegally shut down the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, designed to protect communities from natural disasters before they strike.
For the past 30 years, the BRIC program has provided communities across the nation with resources to proactively fortify their infrastructure against natural disasters. By focusing on preparation, the program has protected property, saved money that would have otherwise been spent on post-disaster costs, reduced injuries, and saved lives.
“Any community in Maryland can be struck by a devastating natural disaster that forever changes the lives of those who live there,” said Attorney General Brown. “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. 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.”
Responding to the catastrophic losses resulting from Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, Congress passed a law stating FEMA must protect communities through four interrelated functions – mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery. The BRIC program is the core of FEMA’s mitigation effort. A recent study concluded that every dollar FEMA spends on mitigation saves an average of six dollars in post-disaster costs.
The BRIC program supports many difficult-to-fund but nonetheless essential projects, such as constructing evacuation shelters and flood walls, safeguarding utility grids against wildfires, protecting wastewater and drinking water infrastructure, and fortifying bridges, roadways, and culverts.
The impact of the BRIC program’s termination has been devastating, with communities across the country being forced to delay, scale back, or cancel hundreds of mitigation projects. Projects that have been in development for years, and which communities have already invested millions of dollars to design and develop, are now threatened, leaving communities in every corner of our nation at a higher risk of harm from natural disasters.
Over the past four years, FEMA has selected nearly 2,000 projects to receive roughly $4.5 billion in BRIC funding nationwide. Maryland was awarded over $80 million in BRIC funds from 2020–2023, though much of that money was made unavailable when FEMA purported to terminate the program earlier this year. That decision left important infrastructure projects, like mitigation to protect Crisfield, MD and South Baltimore from flooding, without a large share of project funds.
Attorney General Brown and the coalition argue that FEMA’s decision to abruptly terminate the BRIC program violates clear Congressional direction to fund these pre-disaster mitigation projects. They also assert that the agency violated the Administrative Procedure Act, and that the program termination was unlawfully executed because Cameron Hamilton, who was never Congressionally confirmed or qualified to be FEMA Administrator, gave the directive to terminate the BRIC program, and therefore was acting as Administrator unlawfully.
With this lawsuit, Attorney General Brown and the coalition are seeking a preliminary injunction to prevent the Trump administration from spending BRIC funds on other purposes and a permanent injunction to reverse the termination of the BRIC program and require the restoration of these critical funds to the communities relying on them.
In filing this lawsuit, Attorney General Brown joins the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin, and the governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”
