Congressional lawmakers from both parties have consistently criticized the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s ability to respond quickly to disasters and to disperse funds for hazard mitigation projects in a timely way. A new report from the Government Accountability Office lends credence to these claims, highlighting the large number of communities that spend months, even years, awaiting notification on whether they will receive funding from FEMA’s Building Resilience Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program for critical projects that remain “under review.”
On average, the GAO found, FEMA takes between seven and nine months to decide on whether to fund a project or not.
“There’s a lot of waiting going on,” said Chad Berginnis, executive director and CEO of the Association of State Floodplain Managers.
He says members of his group told him this summer that their states were still waiting for awards and obligations for projects from the 2022 and 2023 funding rounds, some of them “very big” projects. While FEMA’s BRIC program has amassed through federal appropriations about $4.8 billion to distribute for resilience projects and programs, only about half of that has been dispersed during the first three grant application rounds since the program was established during the first Trump administration in 2020.
As of March 2025, 700 grant requests from local communities—considered sub-applications to state grants—remained in limbo. Communities told GAO that these review timeframes could extend project timelines and increase costs. Moreover, FEMA did not approve or reject any grant applications while the program was cancelled from April 2025 until March 2026, when the program was reinstated following a federal court order. Shortly after the BRIC program was reinstated, FEMA announced a $1 billion funding opportunity for new applicants.
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The agency “did not communicate key information internally and externally until March 2026 when it announced it was restarting BRIC,” the report authors said.
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During the hiatus, “FEMA did not clarify which subgrants would be terminated. Officials and stakeholders said the lack of actionable information from FEMA headquarters created challenges and delayed mitigation efforts.” In some cases, projects were cancelled.
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GAO said that officials in one state said their community had already expended significant time, effort, and resources on their application, and the project was “unlikely … to continue without BRIC funds.”
Chris Currie, director of Homeland Security and Justice at the GAO and the report’s lead author, told ENR, “It puts the community in a real conundrum. It’s like, well, we don’t have $20 million to front the rest of the project right now because we were expecting to break money. So, do we put it on hold? Do we wait?”
One seismic upgrade project in Mesa County, Calif., had received state approval to begin construction in April 2024, but the bulk of the funding required for the project to advance was held up because the application was still awaiting approval when the BRIC program shut down in 2025, the Kern Valley Sun reported.
Adding Fuel to the Fire
Shortly after the BRIC program was reinstated, FEMA announced a new $1-billion notice of funding opportunity, which closed July 23.
The cumulative impact of these developments has created confusion among various stakeholders, says Brett Mattson, the National Association of Counties (NACo)’s senior legislative director for justice and public safety.
“That 11-month break we went through with the program being cancelled, brought back, new money going out the door, obviously has delayed a lot of these projects,” Mattson told ENR. “I think we’re still trying to pick up the pieces in terms of what that means moving forward and sort of how FEMA is going to operate, and I don’t think it’s immediately clear to us how [the program’s operations] are going to unfold over the next couple of months or years, for that matter.”
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Mattson added that he is hopeful that the BRIC program can begin to whittle down the backlog of projects awaiting funding decisions now that it is operational again.
Moving Forward
The GAO report makes a number of recommendations, most related to increasing transparency and communication with stakeholders, and FEMA officials say they will adopt most of them.
NACo’s Mattson notes that if Congress adopts the FEMA Act, which passed the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in 2025 but has not yet been introduced in the Senate, FEMA would be forced to streamline its review processes.
Chris Currie, says that FEMA was put in a tough position, between the program’s cancellation and DOGE-related staff cuts. “Ultimately we may never know who made the decision to cut the program,” he said.
Currie adds he has spoken with officials at FEMA and believes they are sincere about adopting the report’s recommendations. “I think they are committed to helping states build resilience because they understand how important that it is for disaster prevention.”
However, the agency lost more than a year when billions of dollars could already be being put to work for pre-disaster mitigation, Currie said.
“I think there’s also a fair amount of skepticism out there,” said the floodplain association’s Berginnis, who noted he has heard that in at least some states, fewer communities applied during the latest call for funding. “Basically, you’re waiting on funding for a program that was canceled and then restarted, but no money coming through, why spend the time and effort to do an application?” he said.
