FEMA will resume major grant program after yearlong hiatus, following a court order

The Federal Emergency Management Agency on Wednesday opened applications for a major resilience grant program that the agency canceled last year, less than three weeks after a federal judge ordered FEMA to make the funding available.

FEMA will make $1 billion available for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which helps states, local governments, territories and tribes take on preparedness projects to harden against natural hazards like fires, floods, earthquakes and hurricanes.

“When done correctly, mitigation activities save lives and reduce the cost of future disasters,” Karen S. Evans, FEMA's acting leader, said in a statement announcing the resumption.

The Trump administration has slashed disaster preparedness dollars across multiple FEMA programs. It’s been one year since President Donald Trump approved any state or tribe’s request for hazard mitigation funding, a typical add on to major disaster declarations.

Still, a FEMA document outlining the grant opportunity signals the administration might now be embracing aspects of mitigation to safeguard against disasters, stating that “BRIC aims to shift the focus of federal investments away from reactive post-disaster spending towards proactive infrastructure-focused hazard mitigation."

The funding announcement comes after FEMA under a previous acting leader, Cameron Hamilton, canceled the BRIC program last April, calling it “wasteful and ineffective.” That decision drew blowback from Republican and Democratic lawmakers as roughly $3.6 billion was halted for what amounted to several years’ worth of projects to protect infrastructure, communities and homes across the U.S.

A federal judge last December ruled that FEMA could not eliminate BRIC and ordered FEMA to reverse course after a coalition of 22 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration over the cancellation. After the agency failed to release funding, U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns again ordered FEMA this month to take steps toward restoring the program.

Last week, FEMA announced it would resume program support for BRIC awards when the DHS shutdown ended, saying that it had finished evaluating the program that was originally signed into law during Trump's first term. Under former President Joe Biden, BRIC became too bureaucratic and “focused on ‘climate change’ initiatives,” FEMA said in a statement.

States will have 120 days to apply for the new funding opportunity, which covers fiscal years 2024 and 2025, since FEMA rescinded last year's opportunity.

While the resumed funding restores access to badly needed assistance for some areas, FEMA imposed new rules that are in line with the Trump administration’s attempt to push more responsibility for disaster management on states.

The new rules, which include the cessation of funding for hazard mitigation planning and non-financial direct technical assistance, could impact smaller communities with fewer resources and expertise.

“The program now maximizes state and local responsibility for resilience and risk reduction rather than federal investing in a wide range of activities,” a FEMA statement said.

However, the new grants also include certain caps on how much any single recipient can receive, and prioritize new applicants and “impoverished communities.” Those changes could be nods to past critiques that the BRIC program favored coastal states and was difficult for rural areas to access.

Additional changes include prioritizing major infrastructure projects that “are ready to implement,” according to FEMA, and that incentivize “the latest hazard-resistant building codes.”

Meanwhile, it's still unclear how quickly they can expect resumption of the grants they were already awarded.

BRIC’s cancellation held up construction of a flood wall in his Washington district, Rep. Rick Larsen, a Democrat and House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee ranking member, said in a statement Wednesday. “Slowing states’ ability to prepare for disasters was shortsighted, and communities like Aberdeen paid the price," Larsen said.

In the last decade, there have been almost as many weather- and climate-related disasters causing $1 billion in damages or more as there were in the 35 years preceding that, according to a Climate Central database.

Multiple studies have shown that preemptive investments in disaster readiness can yield significant savings. A 2024 study funded by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found every $1 invested in disaster preparation saved $13 in economic impact, damage and cleanup costs.

Former FEMA officials, lawmakers and disaster survivors have expressed cautious hope that newly sworn in Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin could bring more stability to the agency after Kristi Noem’s tumultuous tenure. Mullin endorsed FEMA’s mission at his Senate confirmation hearing last week and said he backed efforts to make FEMA more effective, speed up payments to state and local jurisdictions and better serve rural communities.

FILE - The Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters is photographed in Washington, May 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)

Tracy Kidder, an award-winning narrative nonfiction writer who turned everything from computer engineering to life in a nursing home into unexpected bestsellers, has died. He was 80.

His son, Nat Kidder, confirmed to The Associated Press that Kidder died from lung cancer Tuesday at his daughter's home in Boston.

Kidder won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his 1981 work “The Soul of a New Machine,” which delved into the work of a fledgling computer company long before most people cared about the inner workings of Silicon Valley.

“It was like going into another country,” Kidder told the AP at the time. “At first, I didn’t understand what anybody was saying."

Over the ensuing decades, Kidder immersed himself in worlds he was previously unfamiliar with, producing richly researched books about topics that may not sound like light reading.

For 1989's “Among Schoolchildren,” he spent a year in a fifth-grade classroom, highlighting the dedication of an inner-city teacher in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Later, for 1993's “Old Friends,” he observed the dark side of growing old in America while also chronicling how two friends maintained their dignity in a nursing home despite their infirmities.

Turning these events at a Northampton, Massachusetts, nursing home into a cohesive narrative was one of his major challenges, Kidder told the AP.

“Not a lot happens, and yet I think when you read it, you feel that a lot does. Small things have to count for a great deal,” he said.

In 2003, Kidder wrote “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” about a doctor’s effort to bring health care to Haiti. The work introduced Kidder's work to a new generation of readers as numerous universities added it to their reading lists.

“Mountains Beyond Mountains changed my life--and the lives of so many others around the world,” John Green, author of “The Fault in Our Stars,” wrote on social media Wednesday.

The book even inspired the indie rock band Arcade Fire's 2010 hit “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains).”

“Tracy’s gifts for storytelling and tireless reporting are an enduring reflection of the empathy, integrity, and endless curiosity he brought to everything he did,” Kidder’s longtime publisher Random House said in a statement Wednesday.

All the while, Kidder was careful to eschew focusing on his longtime loves like fishing or baseball, afraid that if he spent too much time in one of those realms, it might cause him to “feel sick of it.”

Kidder was born in New York City in 1945 and attended Harvard University, where he signed up for ROTC to avoid the Vietnam War draft.

After graduation, despite thinking he would be assigned a Washington communications intelligence role, Kidder was instead sent off to Vietnam, where the 22-year-old was placed in charge of an eight-man rear-echelon radio research detachment that monitored the communications of enemy units to try to pinpoint their locations.

Kidder documented the confounding experience in 2005's “My Detachment,” an often humorous memoir that offered insights into the lives of the support troops who made up most of the 500,000-plus U.S. military personnel who were in Vietnam at the height of the buildup when the author served there in 1968-1969. The war became an abstraction for Kidder, who never saw combat and knew the enemy only as “dots on a map.”

After the war, Kidder and his new wife, Frances Gray Toland, moved to the Midwest so Kidder could enroll in the University of Iowa's prestigious creative writing program, where he latched onto the New Journalism wave pioneered by writers like Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote.

Kidder hated the title “literary journalist,” telling the Dallas Morning News in 2010 that he found the description “pretentious.”

The term creative nonfiction irked him too: “It suggests we make things up.”

Instead, he saw himself as a storyteller.

“I don’t think of fiction and nonfiction as all that different, except that nonfiction is not invented," he told the AP. "But I take exception to those people who think nonfiction should not appropriate the techniques of fiction ... They belong to storytelling.”

Kidder is survived by his wife, Fran, their two children, Nat Kidder and Alice Kidder Bukhman, and four grandchildren.

FILE - Author Tracy Kidder stands in his cottage, in South Bristol, Maine, on Sept. 26, 2005. (AP Photo/Pat Wellenbach, File)