Years before the flooding took more than 90 lives in Kerr County, Texas, local officials knew residents faced threats from rapidly rising water. They started planning a flood warning system, one that could alert residents when a flash flood was imminent.
Still, like many other communities around the country, Kerr County struggled to find a way to pay for it. They turned to the largest source available for most localities: funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
FEMA has granted billions over the last five years to help communities prepare for disasters. The idea is one that has been proven on the ground: When communities invest in infrastructure and preparation before a disaster, it can dramatically lessen the damage when a disaster hits, as well as save lives.
Kerr County's funding application was turned down by Texas officials in charge of administering the federal funds. As with most of FEMA's programs, there was more demand for money than was available. Kerr County looked into a Texas state grant program for flood projects, but gave up when they learned it would cover only a small portion of the cost. In Texas alone, more than $54 billion in flood projects are waiting to be built, and state legislators have only dedicated a small fraction of that funding so far.
Now, funding prospects for communities at risk are getting even more limited. The Trump administration has frozen or canceled billions of dollars dedicated to help communities prepare for disasters. Trump signed an executive order saying states should be responsible for funding disaster preparedness, instead of the federal government.
"I think that's going to be a big gap to fill," says Christopher Steubing, executive director of the Texas Floodplain Management Association, which represents flood officials around the state. "FEMA has a reason to be around and they need to be there. There's a lot of programs that they engage with and oversee that communities rely on."
Texas community knows it's at risk
In 2016, Kerr County officials noticed that communities nearby were putting in flood warning systems, designed to save lives. Thirteen people had died in extreme flooding in Wimberley, Texas in 2015. Kerr County faced the same risk.
"I think that this area is one of the highest probability areas for flash floods that exists, OK — probably within, I don't know, within the nation, but certainly within the state," Tom Moser said at a Kerr County commissioners' meeting in 2016, while he was a commissioner.
Officials knew that different sets of river gauges, which measure the height of the water, didn't feed into a centralized system. Some road crossings across the Guadalupe River didn't have adequate warnings. Other counties had installed warning sirens to alert residents when the river was flooding.
The county put together a proposal for a flood warning system, though installing sirens was cut from the plan after pushback, including from one commissioner concerned about sirens going off in the middle of the night. The cost was just under $1 million.
The county then looked to federal funds from FEMA, which were available in Texas through the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program. That program offers money to areas with disaster declarations so they can rebuild and prepare for future disasters. Texas was granted federal funding after several flood disasters, including Hurricane Harvey in 2017. The funds are administered by the Texas Division of Emergency Management, but Kerr County was turned down twice by the state agency, according to transcripts of county meetings.
Then, Kerr County, along with the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, looked to state funding. Texas had created a special fund for flood projects in 2019, known as the Flood Infrastructure Fund, which was seeded with $793 million. It offers loans and grants, though the grants still require local communities to pay for much of their projects.
Under the state's grant formula, Kerr County would have had to cover 95% of the cost. Former Commissioner Moser says that was a dead end for the flood warning project. Current Kerr County officials did not respond to questions from NPR about why the flood warning project wasn't completed.
"Not having the funds to accomplish it was not very satisfying to me but we tried," Moser says. "That's all we could do. We didn't have the resources in the county operating budget to do that."
Local communities in need of funding
Kerr County's funding struggle is common. Many communities across the country don't have the funds needed to build large flood control projects that could keep residents safer. The challenge is that those projects don't generate revenue, unlike a water supply project where cities can charge residents for the water itself.
Instead, communities have to consider raising local taxes to pay for flood control projects. Moser says that was a nonstarter in Kerr County, since taxes were rarely raised during his time as a commissioner. Tax increases are politically arduous across Texas.
"Those always kind of get shunned upon in this state most of the time," Steubing says.
Given that large flood projects can cost tens of millions of dollars, FEMA's new funding programs over the last five years were a game changer for many communities. They marked a key shift for the agency: Instead of just paying for damage from disasters after the fact, helping communities become more resilient before disasters occur could save lives and reduce damage and costs.
Now, the Trump administration has canceled the $4.6 billion program, known as Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC). The cancellation includes grants that were already awarded to communities across the country. Other funding specifically for flood projects, under the Flood Mitigation Assistance program, has been frozen.
Trump has said he wants to eliminate FEMA as the agency exists today and has directed state and local governments to take a larger role in preparing for disasters, "thereby saving American lives, securing American livelihoods, reducing taxpayer burdens through efficiency, and unleashing our collective prosperity," according to the executive order.
Steubing says his association of flood managers supports making FEMA's programs more efficient, since applying for grants and doing the required technical analyses can be out of reach for many smaller communities. Even for those with the capacity to apply, it can take many tries.
"Typically, you've got to make a run at it two times or so," Steubing says. "There's always a bigger demand out there than they ever put funding available."
Still, losing federal funding will leave a large hole, he says. In 2024, Texas released its first-ever statewide plan for addressing flood risk, finding that 1 in every 6 people in Texas lives or works in a flood hazard area. It also found that local governments aren't able to handle the projected $54.5 billion in costs for flood projects. Up to 80% to 90% would need to come from state and federal sources to complete the projects.
Texas' state flood fund has awarded almost $670 million to projects so far, but the fund can be challenging for some communities to access. It offers zero-interest loans, which communities must still pay back, or a grant for a portion of the flood construction project. Still, under the state's grant formula, communities like Kerr County only get 5% of the cost covered.
"We've actually talked to them about making that more of a grant opportunity and enlarging that piece, still requiring community assistance, but then just making it a little more accessible to a lot of the parts of the state," Steubing says.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has directed state legislators to consider programs to improve flood warning and preparedness in an upcoming special legislative session.
Flood projects designed for the past, not a hotter future
Even if Texas were to construct all the needed flood projects, climate experts say it wouldn't fully protect residents. That's because many projects don't take climate change into account. In a hotter climate, rainfall has already gotten more intense in Texas. Still, many communities use outdated rainfall records to design their projects and calculate what kind of storms they should endure.
In Harris County, where Houston is located, flood officials analyzed whether rainfall had gotten worse and found that extreme storms that used to drop 13 inches of rain now drop 17 inches of rain. That added millions of dollars to their construction costs, since the flood projects needed to be engineered to handle more water.
"The past used to be reliable for engineers to depend upon to predict the future, but with climate change, you can't do that," says Jim Blackburn, co-director of Rice University's Severe Storm Prevention, Education and Evacuation from Disasters Center. "I think that, in a nutshell, is one of the biggest problems we're facing throughout the country."
Blackburn says as storms continue to get more extreme, Texas will need to rely more heavily on other strategies to protect people, like relocating residents out of dangerous floodplains or expanding natural wetlands and floodplains around rivers so floodwaters have somewhere to go.
"We keep repeating the same pattern," Blackburn says. "We get flooded. Homes get destroyed. We rebuild the homes where they are. Maybe we elevate them a little bit. Maybe we make them stronger, but we keep replicating the same pattern of development."
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