Nine months after federal officials announced they would end a signature disaster-resilience grant program, then restarted it, more than $2 billion earmarked for it still had not reached the communities that applied, the Government Accountability Office found. GAO’s September 24 report counted 700 subapplications worth about $2.2 billion still pending as of March 2026 under the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, known as BRIC, out of $4.8 billion made available for the program since fiscal year 2020.
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What GAO found still waiting
The GAO report found that of the $4.8 billion available for BRIC grants between fiscal years 2020 and 2023, only $2.5 billion had been awarded and just $62 million had actually been reimbursed to communities as of the review, a gap between money set aside and money that has actually reached a project. Christopher P. Currie, GAO’s director of homeland security and justice issues, led the review. The remaining roughly $2.2 billion covers 700 subapplications that, as of March 2026, were still awaiting a FEMA decision, with reviews GAO says typically taking seven to nine months to complete, a pace that alone would explain part of the backlog even without a program-wide disruption layered on top of it. Because subgrants move through a state or tribal applicant before reaching a local project, a single pending decision at FEMA can leave dozens of local mitigation plans, from elevating flood-prone homes to hardening a water system against wildfire, waiting on money that was appropriated years earlier.
A program FEMA said it would end, then didn’t
FEMA announced it would terminate BRIC in April 2025. A separate account from the American Society of Civil Engineers’ infrastructure report card project put the termination date at April 4, 2025, and said the agency rescinded roughly $880 million in unspent funding at the time, with the administration arguing the program’s grants had not delivered mitigation value in proportion to their cost relative to state and local investment already underway. BRIC itself dates to the Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018 and launched in 2020 as a replacement for the older Pre-Disaster Mitigation program, and the ASCE account puts its total awards since then at more than $5 billion before the 2025 termination. FEMA reversed course and restarted the program in March 2026, the same month GAO’s pending-application count was taken, leaving the agency’s own about-face as a direct contributor to the year hundreds of communities spent in limbo waiting on a decision that had already been budgeted.
How the program is supposed to work
BRIC funds come from a set-aside of federal post-disaster grant funding, and the Environmental Protection Agency describes the program as reserving 6 percent of that funding for pre-disaster mitigation projects such as floodplain restoration and flood diversion systems, typically covering 75 percent of project costs, or 90 percent for smaller and lower-income communities. States and tribes act as the applicants on behalf of local communities, which is why an individual homeowner cannot apply to FEMA directly even when a stalled award affects a local flood-control or resilience project nearby, and why the pending applications GAO counted are attributed to states and tribal governments rather than to any single town or household.
The 2026 funding round is still open
Despite the backlog GAO documented, the restarted program is taking new applications on its usual cycle. Mississippi’s state emergency management agency, which channels BRIC funding to local governments, listed a June 12, 2026, deadline for the current funding cycle, an indication that the program’s on-again, off-again status has not stopped new rounds from opening even as the prior cycle’s awards remain unresolved. FEMA’s own program page continues to list BRIC funding activity for communities checking the status of the broader initiative, though it does not publish a running count of the kind GAO produced showing how many prior-cycle applications remain undecided.
Why the pending total matters
For the hundreds of communities represented in GAO’s pending count, the practical effect is a mitigation project, such as a floodwall, a buyout or a stormwater upgrade, that cannot move forward until FEMA acts, regardless of how the federal government’s own messaging about the program’s future has shifted twice in less than a year. GAO’s report does not set a new timeline for clearing the backlog, and the agency’s cost-share structure means even a released award still requires the applying state or tribe to cover a quarter, or in some cases a tenth, of the project cost before construction can start. Community officials weighing whether to keep an application alive through another round of federal uncertainty have, for now, no GAO estimate of how long the current 700-application queue will take to clear, only the seven-to-nine-month review window that applied before the program’s year-long disruption began, and no public commitment from FEMA about whether that window still holds now that the backlog has grown this large.
The relief that isn’t stuck in a federal backlog
GAO found 700 BRIC subapplications still waiting on a FEMA decision nine months after the agency said it would end the program, then restarted it, leaving communities and the homeowners in them uncertain which mitigation costs the government will eventually help cover.
The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit covers heating, cooling and home-repair help along with an application log and renewal calendar for keeping track of separate state and local deadlines that do not run through FEMA at all.
Compare the home-cost relief options in The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit.
This article was produced with AI assistance and checked against the primary sources linked above.
Warren Cohen is a finance writer based in Phoenix, Arizona, covering personal finance topics including credit, banking, and beginner investing. He earned his degree in business administration from Arizona State University and began his career working in consumer finance, where he gained direct experience with lending and credit systems. He now writes for personal finance websites and fintech platforms, focusing on clear, practical content that helps readers make informed financial decisions.
