What the Texas Floods Can Teach Us About Disaster Readiness in a Changing Climate

Earlier this year, the federal government dismantled what had quietly become one of its most significant tools for climate resilience.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, better known as BRIC, was stripped of funding and effectively ended without ceremony. Grant agreements already signed were canceled. Award letters were rescinded. Applications in final stages were thrown out. Billions of dollars that states and localities had spent years planning to use for infrastructure upgrades—stormwater systems in North Carolina, wildfire protections in California, flood control in Louisiana—were withdrawn or rerouted with a stroke of the pen.

FEMA officials called the program wasteful. They argued that BRIC had wandered from the agency’s core mission. And then, in June, U.S. President Donald Trump made the subtext unmistakable. “We want to wean” states and local governments off of FEMA altogether, he declared, as if disaster mitigation were a drug, and as if the desire to protect communities before they break were a dependency worth shaking.

If we truly care about making this country great, we could start by making sure our towns aren’t wiped off the map every time it rains.

Just weeks after that statement, and with the cancellation of BRIC still fresh, one of the deadliest floods in recent Texas history began to unfold. Over the July 4 weekend, a stalled storm system released sheets of rain across the Hill Country, turning rivers into wrecking currents in a matter of hours. The Guadalupe River rose more than 30 feet overnight, devouring homes and roads and everything in between. At Camp Mystic near Kerrville, dozens of girls and counselors were caught in the dark without warning. Some clung to trees. Others were rescued by helicopter. Many did not make it out. As of this writing, the death toll exceeds 100, and continues to climb. Entire neighborhoods are gone. The water has not fully receded, and the long-term impact has barely begun to register.

To be clear, BRIC would not have prevented this flood. The program funds large-scale infrastructure improvements—new drainage networks, elevated housing, reinforced power systems—that take years to design and construct. It is not meant to stop water in its tracks. It is meant to give communities a fighting chance in the long run. But that distinction has been repeatedly twisted to justify doing nothing. What happened in Kerr County may not have been preventable. What happens next—and what happens in every county like it—absolutely is.

The truth is, disasters are not just acts of nature. They are shaped by policy. They are made worse by delay and neglect and political convenience. And they are made deadlier when communities are forced to face them without the resources they need. We now live in a country where a young girl at summer camp must wonder if the river beside her bunk will rise in the night, where families face flood insurance premiums that exceed their mortgage payments, and where nursing homes sit one transformer away from catastrophe every time the grid fails. These are not flukes. They are the foreseeable consequences of systems we refuse to maintain. They are the result of a government that pulls back precisely when it should step in.

Mitigation funding is not glamorous. It does not come with ribbon cuttings or breaking news alerts. But it works. According to FEMA’s own analysis, every dollar invested in hazard mitigation saves $6-13 in future recovery costs. BRIC was designed to scale that logic. It offered grants of up to $50 million for large, shovel-ready projects and prioritized funding for communities that lacked the tax base or political influence to go it alone. In just a few years, it helped fund floodplain relocations in Pennsylvania, stormwater upgrades in the Midwest, grid hardening in hurricane zones, and wildfire protections across the West. It was one of the few programs in government structured to respond not just to what happened yesterday, but to what is coming tomorrow.

And what is coming is already here. The United States now experiences a billion-dollar disaster every three weeks. In 2023, insurers lost more than $15 billion covering home and property damage. That same year, multiple major insurance carriers stopped issuing new policies in California, Florida, and Louisiana. The National Flood Insurance Program is tens of billions in debt. And updated federal risk-rating formulas, designed to more accurately reflect the true cost of insuring high-risk properties, have caused premiums to surge in low-lying and coastal areas. Many Americans now live in homes that are technically insured but functionally vulnerable. Others have dropped their coverage altogether, forced to take the gamble because they cannot afford not to.

This is not just a crisis of cost. It is a crisis of coverage. In entire regions of the country—wildfire-prone communities, floodplain towns, rural counties without backup systems—insurance is becoming either unavailable or unsustainable. State-run insurers of last resort, like California’s FAIR Plan or Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, have become overloaded safety valves in systems that were never meant to carry this much pressure. What used to be a hedge against risk has become a red flag to investors, lenders, and residents alike. The market is signaling what policymakers still refuse to say out loud. Our infrastructure is failing to keep up with the pace of the climate, and private institutions know it.

It was into this vacuum that BRIC had begun to build. Slowly, imperfectly, but with seriousness. It was a signal to local governments that the federal government still believed in shared risk and coordinated investment. It was one of the few mitigation tools scaled to meet the reality we now inhabit. And its elimination—during a year already marred by extreme heat, flash flooding, and billion-dollar storms—is less a cost-saving measure than a declaration of surrender.

FEMA says its mission is response. But helicopters cannot rebuild communities. Tarps cannot fix levees. Emergency declarations do not replace the decades of infrastructure degradation they are called in to cover. Without preparation, response is triage. Without mitigation, disaster becomes the default.

We are still governing like the greatest risk we face is a storm every few years. But the climate no longer operates on that timetable. The weather is more severe, less predictable, and more frequent than any period in modern history. And yet we continue to treat resilience as a luxury, rather than what it is: the only way forward.

Some on the political right argue that states should be able to stand on their own, that a lean federal government is the mark of strength. But there is nothing strong about leaving small towns to beg for help after the water hits. There is nothing efficient about spending 10 times more to rebuild what could have been protected. And there is nothing admirable about calling communities dependent simply because they cannot manufacture levees or redesign drainage systems overnight.

The political left, for its part, too often clings to the moral high ground of having predicted all of this. But accuracy is not strategy. The point is not who said it first. The point is what we do now, while we still have the chance to act.

This is no longer about climate as abstraction or partisanship. It is about infrastructure. It is about capacity. It is about whether or not a town like Kerrville, or Stillwater, or Mount Pleasant, will have the tools it needs not just to survive a storm but to recover from it, to stay rooted after the headlines fade.

If we truly care about making this country great, we could start by making sure our towns aren’t wiped off the map every time it rains. We could start by investing in the systems that let people stay in place, rather than flee after loss. We could recognize that greatness is not measured by how quickly we clean up after tragedy, but by how many tragedies we prevent from becoming fatal.

We cannot prevent every disaster. But we can choose how many we meet with foresight, and how many we force communities to weather alone. The cost of cutting BRIC will not appear on a balance sheet. It will show up in washed-out roads, closed hospitals, homes that never reopen, neighborhoods that never recover. And in the obituaries of those who lived in places we decided were no longer worth preparing for.

That is not resilience. That is abdication.

And we should stop pretending otherwise.