Trump Revoked Rules Meant to Protect Against Disasters Like Texas Floods

President Donald Trump traveled to central Texas on July 11, one week after flash floods ravaged the region. With 120 people confirmed dead and another 170 still missing, the Trump administration and Texas Republican state leaders are facing intense scrutiny for management and budgetary decisions that could have potentially mitigated the devastation. Officials at the National Weather Service have said that Trump’s recent staffing cuts did not impact weather forecasting or alerts, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has bristled at questions about whether a different government response could have lessened the death toll. “Who’s to blame?” Abbott said, in response to a reporter’s question on July 8. “Know this, that’s the word choice of losers.”

But Trump’s National Weather Service cuts are just one facet of a policy agenda that has long been outright hostile to emergency preparedness and climate science writ large. On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order revoking a set of federal flood protections known as the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard. The rule — which was also revoked by Trump during his first term and reinstated under Joe Biden’s presidency — required federally funded infrastructure projects to comply with certain design requirements. Critical buildings such as schools, libraries, water treatment plants, public highways, and fire stations would have to be rebuilt to withstand flooding and rising seas — either located outside of vulnerable floodplains or constructed to be more resilient — in order to receive disaster aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

The National Association of Home Builders, the lobby group for the home-building industry, vehemently opposed the rule when former President Barack Obama first proposed it in 2016. The group claimed that the regulatory burden would increase construction costs; echoing the industry line, Trump called various infrastructure permitting rules a “massive, self-inflicted wound on our country” when he first rolled them back in 2017.

The reality, however, is that the rule was based on common sense: As the climate crisis worsens, structures destroyed by floods should be rebuilt in ways that would reduce the risk of the same thing happening again. The goal of the standards were not only to protect human lives and homes, but also to save taxpayer money, preventing a never-ending cycle of destroy-rebuild-repeat. On paper, this is a policy Republicans should support: Trump, of course, often cites the need to save taxpayer dollars as an excuse to cut vital public programs, including his proposal to start “phasing out” FEMA, purportedly to leave disaster management to the states. Rebuilding structures outside of floodplains would reduce the amount of FEMA money funneled to disaster repair — but by acknowledging that climate change exists, the rules simply don’t fit Trump’s agenda.

Now, with those guidelines thrown out the window, the recovery response to the floods could replicate a destructive pattern. The hilly terrain and thin topsoil of the Texas Hill Country has always made the region particularly vulnerable to flash flooding. That risk will only grow as storms get more intense and destructive.

“Why on earth would the federal government want it to be rebuilt to a lower standard and waste our money so that when the flood hits, if it gets destroyed again, we’re spending yet more money to rebuild it?” Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, said in an April interview with Grist.

The consequences of Trump’s first rollback of the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard began to come into view last fall, after Hurricanes Helene and Milton slammed the Southeastern U.S. According to The New York Times, at least five water treatment plants in Florida that were exempt from tougher national building standards received about $200 million in federal funding. Those plants sustained damage from the storms, including water line breaks and power losses. Another seven water plants, rebuilt to lower flood standards with $100 million in public funds, were identified as high risk but escaped damage during Milton and Helene. Berginnis told the Times that “hundreds of millions if not billions” have been spent on buildings that are unprepared for intense floods.

Whether any of those structures were impacted by these floods remains to be seen. But from Texas to North Carolina, Los Angeles to Maui, it’s clear that nowhere is truly safe from the devastating impacts of the climate crisis. As we push for the phaseout of planet-warming fossil fuels, we must also make strides to protect communities that are already in harm’s way. The only “word choice of losers,” as Governor Abbott put it, is pretending that the emergency isn’t already here.