More than 700 subapplications for Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grants — worth $2.2 billion — remain in limbo after the Federal Emergency Management Agency halted and then restarted the hazard mitigation program, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report.
FEMA announced it was ending BRIC in April 2025, then reinstated it in March after a judge ruled the termination was unlawful. As of March, hundreds of communities were waiting for FEMA to award over $2 billion through the program, according to the GAO.
“BRIC got caught up in the wave of DOGE cuts early in the [Trump] administration, and it was canceled, then stayed in limbo for a year,” the report’s author, Christopher Currie, GAO director of homeland security and justice, told Smart Cities Dive. FEMA is now dealing with a backlog of BRIC projects that were in review before the cancellation, even as the agency considers applications from a notice of funding opportunity for fiscal year 2024-2025 that were due in July, he said.
“They have their hands full trying to get through these projects,” Currie said. “I think FEMA wants to implement this program; they support disaster mitigation because ultimately, if it works well, it makes their job easier on the back end in responding to disasters.”
But reviewing grant applications is complicated because the agency works with many jurisdictions that all have different ways of operating, he said. “So, it’s going to be tough, and canceling BRIC outright with really no justification or no rationale and no plan for what to do when they canceled it was really a mess.”
FEMA never informed its regional officers about what to tell cities and states about the canceled grants, Currie said, so local governments were left in the dark about how to proceed.
“Whenever a community or a state gets a sum of federal money, it takes a lot of resources and capacity to manage that money,” he said. “In some cases, some of these projects could be larger than the city’s annual budget for the whole city, and they don’t have engineers and project managers just waiting around to manage it.”
Inflation also affects projects that have been put on hold because it means “the longer you wait to start a project, the more expensive it gets,” Currie said.
The GAO reviewed FEMA documentation, analyzed BRIC data from four grant cycles and interviewed FEMA officials and representatives from six states and six communities for the report. It found that the agency took an average of seven to nine months to award grants. “Reducing these time frames could help communities start these activities sooner and minimize additional expenses,” the report states.
The report makes seven recommendations to FEMA, including identifying efficiencies in its subapplication review process, improving internal and external communication and establishing performance goals to determine program effectiveness. The Department of Homeland Security “concurred and identified actions it plans to take,” according to the report.
