The Pennsylvania town of Duryea sits beside the Lackawanna River. From churches, schools and homes residents can see the normally placid water — and know what it can become when heavy rains push the river over its banks. Since the 1970s, an earthen levee has shielded Duryea, but the river now reaches higher levels than it used to. Development and climate change have increased storm intensity and runoff, and Luzerne County flood officials say the levee must be raised roughly three feet to provide adequate protection.
Floods are not hypothetical for the region. Massive storms inundated the county in 2011 and 2014, and several major floods have caused millions in damage in recent years. The National Climate Assessment reports that the heaviest rainstorms in the Northeast drop about 60% more rain today than in the mid-20th century. “We are seeing increased storms and increased water volumes,” says Laura Holbrook, director of the Luzerne County flood protection authority. “It definitely keeps me up at night.”
Local officials spent hundreds of thousands on engineering designs so they could quickly apply for roughly $11 million in federal mitigation money to raise the levee. But for more than a year they could not access the grants because the federal government stopped disbursing and processing funds tied to the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program. The pause came after the Trump administration canceled the program, saying it was eliminating waste, fraud and abuse, and halted billions in mitigation funding that communities had been promised.
BRIC was created after Congress expanded disaster preparedness funding in 2018. FEMA had been distributing money for projects from flood walls to wildfire protections, and an agency report touted the investments as lifesaving and cost-saving. Applications repeatedly exceeded available funding, even after the Biden administration increased BRIC’s budget. Local officials and researchers say pre-disaster investments can substantially reduce damage and recovery costs.
The Trump administration’s cancellation provoked pushback from local and state leaders of both parties. Luzerne County officials, including emergency manager Keith Moss and Congressman Rob Bresnahan, who represents the area, warned that small towns lack the tax base to cover multi-million-dollar infrastructure projects. “They don’t have the resources,” Bresnahan said. “They just don’t have $10 million laying around.” For Duryea, the levee upgrade price tag is roughly three times the town’s annual budget; the borough has about 5,000 residents.
Twenty states sued the administration over the BRIC shutdown. Last week, FEMA agreed to restart the largest federal grant program for disaster mitigation, following the lawsuit. But the restart leaves lingering problems: two years’ worth of applicants may compete for one year’s funding, and FEMA indicated it would prioritize “major infrastructure projects.” The agency has not provided clear timelines for when funds will flow again or whether projects tied to climate change will be eligible.
The delay and uncertainty mean Duryea and many other small, rural communities remain exposed while they wait for money Congress already approved. “We’re a country full of sitting ducks, unfortunately,” says Andrew Rumbach of the Urban Institute, referring to towns vulnerable to floods and wildfires as climate-driven hazards become more frequent and costly.
Operational challenges could compound the funding pause. It has taken a year or more in past rounds for FEMA to review and award grants, and the agency has lost thousands of employees under the current administration, increasing the risk of administrative bottlenecks.
The federal messaging on FEMA and mitigation policy has also been mixed. The Trump administration has repeatedly called for deep cuts to FEMA or its elimination, criticized prior climate-focused initiatives, and asserted that recent BRIC rounds were bogged down in bureaucracy. An agency email about the court-ordered BRIC restart echoed those critiques. Incoming DHS leadership has signaled intentions to restructure FEMA, raising questions about the agency’s future priorities.
Those policy shifts matter because small, impoverished communities often cannot compete with wealthier cities for federal grants. BRIC and other reforms during the Biden administration aimed to level the playing field by offering extra federal cost-share assistance and simplifying applications for smaller jurisdictions. But many of those changes were reversed last year, removing supports that helped towns without full-time grant staff or professional emergency managers.
“These communities have volunteer fire departments, volunteer emergency management people,” says James Brozena, a former county flood official who now advises local governments. “A lot of these communities, they have some little old lady that basically is the entire office staff.” Without dedicated personnel to prepare complex grant applications, small towns struggle to win competitive funds, even when projects are high-priority and technically sound.
The administration’s skepticism toward projects linked to climate adaptation also clouds future decisions. Sea walls, raised levees and wildfire-hardening measures are direct responses to sea level rise, stronger storms and more intense wildfires — all phenomena tied to climate change. If FEMA deprioritizes climate-related projects, communities facing those specific threats could find themselves shut out of mitigation dollars.
FEMA’s recent filings say the agency will restart BRIC and run a competition for available funds, but given reduced staffing, a backlog of applications and political debates about eligibility, the path from application to construction remains uncertain. For towns like Duryea, the risk is immediate: levees that once sufficed may not as storms grow more extreme, and delaying upgrades until federal money is restored leaves people and property exposed.
Local officials say residents are anxious. They attend council meetings and press for action, but without access to federal grants, the options are limited. Duryea’s emergency manager, Keith Moss, says the community is worried about the next big storm. Until federal assistance resumes in earnest and policies explicitly account for changing climate risks and the limited capacity of small jurisdictions, many rural and small-town America will face elevated disaster risk with little means to mitigate it.