Posted on 05/27/25
| News Source: Maryland Matters
As Crisfield Mayor Darlene Taylor sees it, the low-lying Maryland town has no future unless it can hold back rising water. Computer models suggest that the adjacent Chesapeake Bay could get high enough by 2050 to trigger daily floods that are deep enough to stall cars on roads.
Hope arrived in the form of a federal grant program created during the first Trump administration under the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program helped rural communities like hers to invest in massive projects to fight disaster threats, ranging from wildfires to floods.
Crisfield officially got word from FEMA last July that it had secured $36 million from the program to launch the first phase of its massive flood-protection initiative. “Everything had lined up and everything was in place for this to be a highly successful project,” Taylor said.
A lot has changed since then. Trump returned to office in January, vowing to drastically shrink the size of the federal government. In a terse April 4 press statement, FEMA announced it was pulling the plug on the disaster-preparedness funding, not just for Crisfield but for all applicants and grantees, calling it “wasteful and ineffective,” though without citing evidence to support those claims.
The administration announced that any undistributed funds from the program’s inaugural year, 2020, through 2023 would be returned to the Disaster Relief Fund or the U.S. Treasury. The agency also canceled the 2024 funding opportunity, just days before the application deadline for that year’s $750 million allocation.
The reversal has left hundreds of communities nationwide scrambling to find alternative sources for the billions of dollars they had been promised. Among the six states and the District of Columbia in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, BRIC grants had been on track to disburse nearly $1 billion across about 350 applications, according to a Bay Journal analysis of FEMA’s database.