SCRANTON, Pennsylvania — His house has been condemned for nearly two years, since the flood. The front yard where he played Wiffle ball as a kid is a wildland of weeds, caked mud and an overturned red pickup truck that the floodwaters carried 50 yards.
Since President Donald Trump canceled a popular disaster grant program in April, Dave Kozlansky is losing hope that the city will buy his property, demolish the home and leave the land empty to absorb floodwater from an adjacent creek.
“Everything was in motion. Then I got a call from the city saying they nixed the program and applications were going to be shut down,” said Kozlansky, a local fishing guide, as he walked through the overgrowth in work pants and sneakers.
Hundreds of communities, including this old industrial city, are struggling after Trump’s cancellation of $4.5 billion for local projects that are designed to protect neighborhoods from flooding, hurricanes and other disasters. The money would have come from a program, called Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, that Trump’s first administration had created in 2018.
Local officials, emergency managers and dozens of members of Congress including Republicans condemned Trump’s April 4 decision. The cancellations have affected states and communities led by Democrats and Republicans at a time when damage is climbing from events driven by rising temperatures and expanding real estate development.
But as it becomes apparent that the grants are gone for good, communities are forced to decide between several options, all of them bad.
“There are no alternative funding sources,” said Adam Emrick, city administrator of Conway, South Carolina, which lost a $2.2 million federal grant to create a stormwater retention area and now needs money for construction. “The risk to our residents of flash flooding remains.”
In Crisfield, Maryland, a low-income city of 2,500 on the Chesapeake Bay, the loss of a $36 million grant derailed a “transformational” flood-protection project, Mayor Darlene Taylor said in an email.
Crisfield officials are looking for other streams of money. They’re also considering splitting the project into phases and pleading with Congress to reinstate the canceled program, also called BRIC.
“Losing this funding puts our city’s survivability at continued high risk,” Taylor said.
The mayor of Stillwater, Oklahoma, Will Joyce, said officials in the city of 50,000 people have approved “large rate increases” for municipal water to make up for the cancellation of a $19.6 million grant to improve drainage systems.
Here in Scranton, a city of 75,000 in northeastern Pennsylvania, Mayor Paige Cognetti, a Democrat, is asking the state to replace the $2.7 million BRIC grant, which would have paid 75 percent of the cost of buying and demolishing 18 flood-damaged homes, including Kozlansky’s.
“We certainly rang the bell for our congressional delegation. The governor’s team, they’re all aware of this, too. Our congressional representative said he’d advocate,” Cognetti said, referring to Rep. Rob Bresnahan, a Republican who urged the administration to revive the grant program.
“That’s great,” Cognetti added. “I think we need to be realistic, though. We can’t sit around waiting for them to reverse a decision.”
The 18 homes, concentrated in two neighborhoods, were heavily damaged by a flash flood in September 2023 that overflowed creeks. Kozlansky’s house was inundated with 6 feet of water in 90 minutes.
Flash flooding has become increasingly damaging in steep hilly areas across Appalachia. It was the main cause of destruction in North Carolina during Hurricane Helene last year.
As climate change intensifies rainstorms, flood experts and federal officials have promoted buyout programs like Scranton’s as an ideal way to avoid flood damage.
“It was just a terrible moment where you see a program that is absolutely not political and absolutely not wasteful getting cut,” Cognetti said of BRIC, referring to Trump’s criticisms of the program.
“You feel like the carpet’s just been pulled from under you,” said Kozlansky, who’s been living with his mother since the flood and did not have flood insurance.
BRIC was ‘concerned with climate change’
Two weeks after Trump canceled the BRIC program, the Rise of Resilience Coalition in New York urged New York City and New York state to take legal action to restore the funding.
“Unfortunately, not much has happened since we issued the letter,” Tyler Taba, director of resilience for the Waterfront Alliance, a coalition member, said in an email. “We met with some folks at City Hall, and they brushed it off.”
Unlike many federal programs that were cut by Trump, BRIC is discretionary and was not mandated by Congress. That leaves communities with fewer legal avenues to challenge the president’s decision.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency created BRIC after Trump himself signed a broad disaster law in 2018. President Joe Biden embraced the program, pouring billions of dollars into it and emphasizing the potential for BRIC to help protect communities against climate impacts.
When Trump canceled BRIC on April 4, FEMA said in a statement that “It was more concerned with climate change than helping Americans affected by natural disasters.” The administration put most of the BRIC funding — $4.5 billion — into FEMA’s disaster fund to help pay for recovery efforts after floods, wildfires and other events.
“There’s a lot of discretion. It’s not funding that is directly appropriated by Congress for specific projects,” said Anna Weber, a senior policy analyst for climate adaptation at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Even as the administration has condemned BRIC, it has also hinted that it might be replaced.
A FEMA advisory issued 12 days after the cancellation said, “FEMA is working to develop a new approach to mitigation that is more responsive to state and local requirements, achieves clear mitigation goals, and results in more-timely obligation of funding.”
“I think they’re going to have to fund those projects through another mechanism that’s not called BRIC,” said former FEMA Administrator Peter Gaynor, who led the creation of BRIC during Trump’s first term. “It’s not a practical thing just to let these projects go uncompleted.”
States are unlikely to fill the financial void. “Trying to get the governor or legislature to approve money for mitigation in an annual budget is pretty much impossible, unless there’s a project that’s so obvious and affects a majority of the people in the state,” Gaynor said.
Although 14 Republican members of Congress joined 69 Democrats in signing a May 12 letter urging the Trump administration to restore the canceled grants, most Republicans have quietly supported Trump’s decision on BRIC.
In mid-April, Bresnahan, the Scranton-area Republican member of Congress, and Arizona Rep. Greg Stanton, a Democrat, introduced legislation to make BRIC a mandatory program by replacing the word “may” with “shall” in a federal law that says a president “may establish” the BRIC program.
The “Save BRIC Act” was assigned to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which in late April defeated a spending-bill amendment sponsored by Stanton that would have required FEMA to release the BRIC funding.
The “Save BRIC Act” has picked up only three co-sponsors. But on Tuesday, a House Appropriations subcommittee approved a fiscal 2026 spending bill for agencies including FEMA that would partially restore BRIC.
