Duryea, Pennsylvania, sits on the banks of the Lackawanna River. From schools, churches and homes residents can watch the usually calm water — and know how violently it can rise when heavy rains push the river over its banks. An earthen levee built in the 1970s has protected the town for decades, but development and more intense storms have raised peak river levels. Luzerne County flood officials say the levee needs to be raised about three feet to provide adequate protection.
The threat is not theoretical. Major storms swamped the county in 2011 and 2014, and repeated floods in recent years have caused millions of dollars in damage. The National Climate Assessment finds the heaviest rainstorms in the Northeast now drop roughly 60% more rain than they did 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. For local leaders, the risk is an everyday concern.
Local officials spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on engineering plans so they could quickly apply for about $11 million in federal mitigation funding to raise Duryea’s levee. But they could not access the grants for more than a year after the federal government stopped disbursing and processing funds tied to the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program. The pause followed the Trump administration’s decision to cancel BRIC, saying it was cutting waste, fraud and abuse, and halting billions in mitigation funds that communities had expected.
BRIC was created after Congress expanded disaster-preparedness funding in 2018. FEMA used the program to award money for projects ranging from flood walls to wildfire protections, and agency reports highlighted the savings and lives protected by such pre-disaster investments. Applications regularly outpaced available funding even after the Biden administration raised BRIC’s budget. Local officials and academic researchers say investing before disasters strikes can substantially reduce damage and recovery costs.
The administration’s cancellation drew bipartisan backlash. Local leaders in Luzerne County — including emergency manager Keith Moss and Congressman Rob Bresnahan — warned that small towns lack the tax base to finance multi-million-dollar infrastructure work. For Duryea, the estimated levee upgrade is roughly three times the borough’s annual budget; the town has about 5,000 residents. “They just don’t have $10 million laying around,” Bresnahan said.
Twenty states sued over the BRIC shutdown, and last week FEMA agreed to restart the program after the courts intervened. But restarting BRIC has not erased the damage: two years of applicants may now compete for a single year’s funding, FEMA said it will prioritize “major infrastructure projects,” and the agency has not provided clear timelines for awarding money or clarified whether projects tied explicitly to climate change will be eligible.
That delay and uncertainty leave Duryea and many other small, rural communities exposed while they wait for funds 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 increase.
Operational problems could make the funding gap worse. In past cycles it has taken a year or more 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. Incoming Department of Homeland Security leadership has signaled plans to restructure FEMA, further clouding the agency’s near-term priorities.
Federal messaging about FEMA and mitigation policy has been inconsistent. The Trump administration repeatedly proposed deep cuts to FEMA or questioned the agency’s role, criticized climate-focused programs, and said prior BRIC rounds were bogged down in bureaucracy. An agency email about the court-ordered BRIC restart echoed those critiques. Meanwhile, many reforms introduced during the Biden administration aimed to help smaller jurisdictions compete by offering extra federal cost-share assistance and simplifying applications. Many of those supports were rolled back last year, removing tools that helped towns without full-time grant staff or professional emergency managers.
Small communities often run on volunteers — volunteer fire departments, volunteer emergency managers and tiny municipal staffs. “A lot of these communities, they have some little old lady that basically is the entire office staff,” says James Brozena, a former county flood official who advises local governments. Without dedicated personnel to prepare complex grant proposals, small towns struggle to win competitive funds even for high-priority, technically sound projects.
The administration’s skepticism about projects framed as climate adaptation adds another layer of risk. Building sea walls, raising levees and hardening communities against wildfire are direct responses to sea level rise, stronger storms and hotter, drier conditions, all linked to climate change. If FEMA deprioritizes climate-related projects, communities confronting those exact threats could be shut out of mitigation dollars.
FEMA has said it will reopen BRIC and run a competition for available funds, but with reduced staffing, a backlog of applications and ongoing political debates over eligibility, the route from application to construction remains unclear. For towns like Duryea the stakes are immediate: levees that once sufficed may no longer be enough as storms grow more extreme, and delaying upgrades until federal money flows again leaves people and property exposed.
Residents and local officials are anxious. Council meetings fill with questions and pleas for action, but without federal grants the options are limited. Until federal assistance resumes in earnest and policies acknowledge changing climate risks and the limited capacity of small jurisdictions, many rural and small-town communities will face elevated disaster risk with few means to mitigate it.