Hazard Mitigation is Back, Baby!

A quick peek at the data on FEMA mitigation spending

Personal Note: This week I’m at the National Adaptation Forum, so apologies for a short-but-sweet article.

One of the most notable changes of 2nd Trump Administration re: FEMA was the sudden curtailing of federal hazard mitigation spending. Seemingly overnight, DHS and FEMA leadership announced the cancellation of the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, failed to release a notice of funding opportunity for the Flood Mitigation Assistance (FMA) program, and stopped approving requests for the Hazard Mitigation Grant (HMGP) program. At the time there was a lot of talk about shrinking the federal role in emergency management, and especially in long-term efforts like hazard mitigation and disaster recovery. FEMA should get back to its roots in disaster preparedness and response, the argument went, and leave mitigation and recovery to the states. We wrote extensively about these changes over at Urban, and the many reasons we thought that abandoning federal mitigation spending might prove short-sighted.

Some context…as a nation we spend very little on hazard mitigation, and most of that comes from the federal government and especially FEMA. From 2015-2024, FEMA spent an average of about $2 billion per year on hazard mitigation, ranging from a low of $704 million in 2016 to a high of $3.6 billion in 2023. That spending plummeted in 2025:

Fast forward to today. Like many of you, I’ve been heartened by news that indicates that federal hazard mitigation spending seems to be slowly, but surely, resuming. The BRIC program – with the court’s encouragement – has been re-envisioned and re-launched, the FMA program is accepting applications, and we’ve seen a steady drumbeat of news about HMGP requests being granted or mitigation projects approved.

Big picture, what does the data say? Is there a clear trend? I used Claude to help pull and analyze numbers from Open FEMA and found that the mitigation spending story largely follows the news. After President Trump returned to office in January of 2025, hazard mitigation approvals slowed to a crawl...from roughly $200 million per month in January of 2025 to virtually zero by the middle of the year. That freeze on mitigation funding continued through early 2026, when a small amount of HMGP spending was approved. Then, suddenly – and around the time that DHS Secretary Noem was “reassigned” – mitigation spending roared back:

A weekly breakdown of mitigation approvals highlights these trends further:

And this bounce in mitigation spending is almost entirely from HMGP dollars…the impact of the resumption of the BRIC and FMA programs will likely not show up in the data until later in 2026 and early 2027.

So for now, welcome back federal hazard mitigation! I’ll be keeping an eye on you.

AI Statement
I used Anthropic’s Claude Code, an AI assistant, to help acquire the data for this article, analyze it, and produce the graphics. I identified which data sets and date ranges I wanted Claude to use, provided the outline and logic for the analysis, and randomly selected data points to validate findings against a manual download from FEMA’s API. I did not use AI for any part of the conceiving, writing or editing of this article.

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