After Hurricane Katrina and its related flooding inundated much of New Orleans in 2005, residents of a large Vietnamese community in the Algiers neighborhood were some of the first to return and rebuild. But 20 years later, their neighborhood is still prone to flooding, especially during hurricane season. And, like much of the city, the land beneath it is also sinking through a process known as subsidence.
“That community loves paved streets,” says Tap Bui, co-executive director of the Sông Community Development Corporation, which works in the area. “It’s like one continual parking lot.” Homes in Algiers are multi-generational, so they need room for a lot of cars, she explains. But with all that asphalt, “When it rains, it just goes straight into the drainage system, and it overloads the one pump station in Algiers.”
In 2022, the City of New Orleans secured a $1.2 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program to help fix the problem. The community had been trying for a decade to redevelop a six-acre lot where Katrina had destroyed a public apartment building. They’d envisioned creating the Hưng Đạo Heritage Garden, complete with a cultural center, walking paths, and an urban farm. But residents never had the resources to turn the vision into a reality. The BRIC grant allowed them to build on those earlier plans while integrating them with new green infrastructure.
“The hope is that if we built a stormwater park that could hold hundreds of gallons of water, that would take some of the strain off the pump and reduce flooding,” Bui told me. “Hopefully, that will help with subsidence that folks are experiencing. The land is sinking to the point where it’s affecting the homes’ plumbing systems.”
“The land is sinking to the point where it’s affecting the homes’ plumbing systems.”
The design phase of the project had just gotten off the ground when President Donald Trump came into office and, with Elon Musk, took a wrecking ball to the federal government, with plans to gut FEMA as an early priority. “I say you don’t need FEMA, you need a good state government,” he said in January while visiting the LA fires. “FEMA is a very expensive, in my opinion, mostly failed situation.”
In March, he issued an executive order requiring, “state and local governments and individuals play a more active and significant role in national resilience and preparedness.” It was a tall order for a place like Louisiana, which gets about $1.4 billion a year from FEMA—about what it spends on its higher education system and more than 5 percent of the entire state budget.
One of the administration’s first moves was to kill off the BRIC program that Algiers has been using to begin mitigating its flooding problem. Congress created BRIC in the bipartisan Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018, which Trump signed in his first administration. The program was an outgrowth of reforms to FEMA in the aftermath of Katrina, and President Joe Biden’s administration infused another $1 billion into it in 2024 as part of his effort to address climate change.
Before Trump shut it down, BRIC had a national portfolio, poised to fund everything from tornado safe-rooms to earthquake detection systems to shoreline upgrades—most of which were designed to protect critical infrastructure like electricity and clean drinking water. But in April, FEMA stopped taking applications for 2024 BRIC grants and started canceling projects that were already on the books from 2020 to 2023—more than $4 billion in funding authorized by Congress.
In Louisiana, 148 grant applications worth $721,281,559 were axed, according to FEMA’s database figures crunched by the New Orleans Times-Picayune. New Orleans alone had submitted at least half a dozen of those grant applications, representing tens of millions of dollars’ worth of potential investments in local infrastructure.
Research shows that these sorts of mitigation efforts can go a long way in protecting communities before disasters strike and saving lives when they do hit. And they save money, too. Every dollar invested in hazard mitigation can generate between $6 and $13 in future benefits. Craig Colten, a retired professor of geography at Louisiana State University who wrote a book examining the failures of the hurricane protection systems in New Orleans after Katrina, explains that BRIC and the mitigation funding have been “hugely important to Louisiana…doing things that can help minimize the impact of storms.”
After Trump shut down BRIC, 20 state attorneys general (though not from Louisiana) sued the administration, arguing that the move was illegal and a violation of the separation of powers doctrine. The lawsuit also alleged that Cameron Hamilton, the acting FEMA administrator who shut down the program, lacked the authority to do so because he hadn’t been confirmed by the Senate. (He was fired about a month later after testifying before Congress that he didn’t think FEMA should be dismantled.)
“The impact of the shutdown has been devastating,” the lawsuit said. “Communities across the country are being forced to delay, scale back, or cancel hundreds of mitigation projects depending on this funding. Projects that have been in development for years, and in which communities have invested millions of dollars for planning, permitting, and environmental review, are now threatened. And in the meantime, Americans across the country face a higher risk of harm from natural disasters.”
“FEMA’s termination of this bipartisan program defies both law and logic.”
On August 5, a federal judge issued an injunction barring the administration from spending BRIC money in ways Congress hadn’t authorized. “FEMA’s termination of this bipartisan program defies both law and logic,” Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown said in a statement after the ruling. “Congress created this fund because America’s towns are already struggling with mounting challenges from climate change.”
While the litigation moves forward, the BRIC program remains in limbo. Bui says that after some community lobbying of Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Sông’s original grant hasn’t been rescinded. So the community has been plowing ahead, using the money to support the initial site investigation and scoping, identifying contaminants, and modeling how much water 10 acres can hold.
Bui’s group has also been training local residents on hazard mitigation, demonstrating strategies for green infrastructure, distributing rain barrels, and planting a native plant garden for maximum water absorption. “We’re hoping that folks will see the benefit of doing small things,” she says,” like adding permeable pavements.”
But whether the rest of the project can move forward without BRIC support is anyone’s guess. “At this point,” Bui says, “we don’t know.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.