Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha joined his second multistate lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s administration this week, signing on to a 20-state challenge against the dismantling of a key disaster mitigation program.
The suit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, seeks to undo the termination of the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Under BRIC, FEMA funds states, tribes, and local government projects that help fortify people and property against natural disasters. Funding can go toward things like flood barriers, building reinforcements, improving wastewater infrastructure, or hardening electric grids. The funds can also be used to prepare emergency plans or identify hazards within communities. FEMA typically covers up to 75% of a project’s cost, although smaller, rural communities can receive up to 90%.
In a statement Wednesday, Neronha said the program’s termination could hurt Rhode Island’s coastal communities.
“There’s no denying that Rhode Island is particularly susceptible to the ever-increasing effects of climate change, which is why we need to stay ahead of the curve on mitigating risk,” Neronha said.
This is the Attorney General’s 27th legal effort against the Trump administration since January. Neronha is not a co-leader on Wednesday’s suit, unlike the one filed Monday in Rhode Island over education funding cuts. The suit is co-led by Attorneys General Andrea Joy Campbell of Massachusetts and Nick Brown of Washington.
Other attorneys general involved are from Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, as well as the governor of Pennsylvania.
Since opening for applications in 2020, BRIC has funded over 2,000 projects with about $4.5 billion in funds. According to the lawsuit, the University of Rhode Island has been using BRIC money to develop a modeling tool for flood risks in Rhode Island’s coastal and inland waters. The project was allocated for fiscal years 2020 through 2023 and was awarded $976,488 across multiple BRIC grants, according to a January 2025 presentation made by the tool’s developers to a legislative study commission on climate change. The lawsuit cites a $348,978 grant for one project as being endangered by the BRIC termination.
“URI’s BRIC project cannot move forward without BRIC funding,” the lawsuit reads. “As a result of the termination of the BRIC program, Rhode Island will have less data and information regarding inland flooding and inland flood risk.”
The lawsuit alleges that BRIC’s suspension violates the separation of powers as well as the Administrative Procedure Act. Lawsuits against the Trump administration over funding cuts have frequently employed similar arguments.
“The President understands that he and his Administration do not have the power to unilaterally withhold Congressionally allocated funding to the states, and yet here we are again,” Neronha said in his statement.
The lawsuit also argues that the elimination of BRIC defies the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. The official who ended the program — Cameron Hamilton, who served as acting administrator of FEMA from January until his firing in May — “was never nominated to serve as FEMA Administrator, nor was he confirmed by the Senate,” according to the suit.
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FEMA, which is itself an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, did not immediately return a request for comment about the lawsuit Wednesday. The agency posted a notice about the program’s termination to its website on April 4, although the link now returns a “Page not found” error as of this writing.
A cached version of the memo stored on Archive.org reads, “The BRIC program was yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program. It was more concerned with political agendas than helping Americans affected by natural disasters.”
An April 16 memo clarified that FEMA would cancel applications for the 2024 funding cycle, as well as all BRIC projects not yet obligated from fiscal years 2020 through 2023, and annul obligated projects yet to begin construction. Unspent funds, which FEMA cited at over $3.6 billion, would be returned to the Disaster Relief Fund. The advisory noted that FEMA would craft a new mitigation strategy that is “more responsive to state and local requirements.”
Wednesday’s lawsuit claims that the abrupt termination of funding “has caused serious harm” as states are not able to move forward with projects and will end up wasting time, effort and money.
“Each day that passes causes more harm and increases the chances that these projects will not be able to go forward, as communities face expiring permits, escalating costs, and eroding stakeholder trust,” the suit reads.
FEMA’s efforts to harden communities against disaster began with pilot programs in the late 1990s and were formalized in 2002 with the Pre-Disaster Mitigation program, which also offered subsidies for mitigation. In response to Hurricane Katrina a year prior, Congress passed legislation in 2006 that furthered mitigation funding as one of FEMA’s key functions. In 2018, legislation reformed FEMA offerings to make them more consistent, and in September 2020, the first applications for the BRIC program opened.
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
