Urban officials had just begun grappling with the deadliest kind of weather — extreme heat — when President Donald Trump stopped them in their tracks by canceling a range of grants and adaptation programs last year as part of his broader attacks on climate policy.
Now, as sweltering U.S. metropolises prepare for summer heat that historically kills more people than hurricanes, floods and wildfires, heat officials say they’re learning how to work within a system that rejects their agendas.
It often occurs in Republican-led states where climate-related funding can’t be relied on to fill gaps left by vanishing federal money.
“The context in which we operate, there’s always gonna be headwinds,” said one local official who works in a red state. “And we just have to expect there’s not gonna be a regulatory environment that supports sustainability initiatives.”
Securing money in a hostile political landscape requires tactical finesse, added the official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about their challenges. That means framing resilience initiatives as economic development rather than climate adaptation.
“We always need to work for commonsense solutions that make sense across the aisle,” they said. “If you’re talking about protecting people, if you’re talking about improving housing, if you’re talking about economic development, those are always gonna be viable strategies.”
The federal government doesn’t define heat waves as a disaster, even as events with fewer victims, like hurricanes and floods, qualify for Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance. So money is short, no matter who’s president. But they said it’s gotten worse under the Trump administration, which has canceled grants ranging from long-term resilience funding from FEMA to tree-planting support from the Forest Service.
Those challenges roared to life at a disaster planning conference in Boston earlier this month. Heat officers from around the country were asked to respond to a fictional scenario in Phoenix, where an imaginary blackout silenced the thrum of air conditioners citywide as temperatures soared to 111 degrees.
Funding lapses were an urgent undercurrent, even as participants dreamed of expanding heat emergency plans and urban cooling projects.
“You can identify those big budget items, and you can advocate for them, but you’re not necessarily going to get them,” Jane Gilbert, a veteran official who has overseen heat programs in Miami, said at the two-day workshop attended by nearly two dozen officials from across the country.
Attendees pressed Gilbert for advice at her dinnertime talk, asking how to find funding from disinterested state and local governments as they dug into pasta and tiramisu. Her advice:
“How do you work it into, you know, every road redo, every park upgrade and every housing project?” Gilbert responded. “That’s the key. It’s not [getting] new money. It’s how do you make it a priority as they’re spending the money they’re going to spend anyway?”
‘This will happen’
Creative thinking was a theme of the Boston heat workshop, hosted May 6 and 7 at Harvard University’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. The program’s centerpiece was a complex thought experiment asking officials to game out their responses to a hypothetical life-or-death scenario.
The setting: You’re a local official in Phoenix when disaster strikes. It’s a blistering 111 degrees and the citywide thrum of air conditioners suddenly goes silent, as the lights blink off for more than a million residents. How do you save lives?
The ideas came one by one. Restore power to hospitals. Check on older and sick residents. Hand out water and food. Open self-powered cooling centers. And hope for the best.
But conference participants consistently ranked money among their primary problems as officials introduced themselves to the room.
FEMA grants are less likely to prioritize heat dangers compared with other disasters, one official lamented. Another said leftover money from the Inflation Reduction Act, former President Joe Biden’s signature climate law that Trump dismantled, would run out within a few years. Still another official said her state has a habit of blocking local environmental projects, adding one more political challenge to the mix.
“The work continues,” said Gilbert, who’s currently serving as chief heat ambassador at the Atlantic Council, a U.S. think tank focused on international affairs. “But it continues without the ability to invest in housing retrofits at the scale that we would have wanted to, or invest in new infrastructure, in general, at the level that we would have.”
The worsening effects of global warming, combined with growing political challenges around addressing climate impacts, are boosting the urgency around finding new solutions. Rising global temperatures are intensifying heat events nationwide. They’re also juicing all kinds of other disasters, like hurricanes and floods, increasing the odds of nightmare scenarios like the hypothetical double-barrel catastrophe in Phoenix.
That scenario was just a thought exercise — but events like it are already happening in the real world.
“Seriously, this will happen, right? And this has happened, as we saw in Texas,” said Satchit Balsari, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School and one of the organizers of the heat workshop.
Two summers ago, a sweltering heat wave settled over Houston just days after Hurricane Beryl slammed the Texas coastline and knocked out electricity for 2 million people. Cooling centers across the city had limited access to generators, and many remained closed for days, leaving residents to sweat it out at home.
Officials in Miami-Dade County have previously sought FEMA funding for generator-powered cooling centers in the event of widespread electricity outages. But grant coordinators told the county that cooling centers were not a priority, and the application was unsuccessful.
The nightmare scenario of heat and widespread blackouts, said Gilbert, who was still chief heat officer at the time, “definitely worries me.”
‘Largest sources of frustration’
Communities nationwide have been affected by federal funding losses.
FEMA last year canceled its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, halting billions of dollars in funding for state and local governments to adapt to extreme weather, floods and other natural disasters. A federal judge last month ordered FEMA to restart the program — but some local officials say heat initiatives were always lower priorities than other adaptation projects, like flood or fire protections.
FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program also provides funding for long-term resilience against extreme weather, including heat. But multiple news reports indicate the agency has been denying these funding applications, which states often tack onto their requests for aid in the aftermath of major disasters.
Other agencies have historically provided support for heat-related projects, including tree-planting initiatives funded by the U.S. Forest Service or energy-efficient construction projects funded by the Department of Energy. Many of these grants have been canceled by the Trump administration.
The funding challenges are affecting communities across the country — but some of the nation’s hottest cities, often located in red states, face the biggest hurdles. Heat officers in places like Florida can’t depend on state funding to fill the gaps left by vanishing federal grants.
Gilbert knows those challenges well. She was appointed Miami-Dade County’s first chief heat officer in 2021 after serving as the city of Miami’s first chief resilience officer. She’s currently the chief heat ambassador at the Atlantic Council, a U.S. think tank focused on international affairs.
Florida has invested in climate adaptation in recent years, she noted, like coastal resilience and flood mitigation projects. But heat initiatives have always been a hard sell. And in some cases, the state has actively undermined local resilience projects.
In 2024, Republican lawmakers prohibited cities and counties from requiring heat protections for workers, such as mandatory shade or water breaks. And last year, the state Legislature passed a law blocking some municipalities from strengthening zoning codes to mandate more heat-resilient buildings, Gilbert said.
Florida isn’t alone. States across the country have been overriding local governments on climate and energy initiatives, especially those with Republican-controlled legislatures.
“Heat has been one of the largest sources of frustration,” Gilbert said at the workshop. “The state is aggressively taking control over local jurisdiction in many ways, but heat is one of them.”
‘No magic bullet’
Some cities are using state funds to help fill the gaps left by dwindling federal grants. That’s easiest in places with strong support for climate action, like New York.
The state’s Climate Smart Communities program, established in 2016, funds local initiatives including extreme heat adaptation plans. And the state’s Environmental Bond Act, passed in 2022, made $4.2 billion available for environmental projects including community cooling initiatives.
But officials have warned that the money won’t replace the recent losses in federal grants.
And Trump has pointed to climate initiatives in blue states like New York as justification for shutting down programs. The White House budget proposal for fiscal 2027 proposes for the second year in a row to eliminate the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps households with energy costs and heating and cooling upgrades.
“The program rewards States such as New York and California, two of the top recipients for LIHEAP funding, which have implemented antienergy and anti-consumer policies that drive up home energy prices,” the White House budget request states.
Meanwhile, climate officials working without the benefit of strong state support are scrambling for ideas. And the breakdown in federal funding is a major blow to communities that have grown accustomed to looking beyond their states for financial support.
“There’s always opportunities to build greater resilience into operations and new capital projects, whether you have more dollars,” Gilbert said. But grants for large stand-alone heat projects? Those are increasingly elusive under the Trump administration.
“I have no magic bullet answer on that,” she said.
