North Carolina Officials Visit Infrastructure Sites as FEMA Lawsuit Moves Forward

Ryan J. Farrick — July 24, 2025

Clear plastic bottle of water on black table; image bySteve Johnson, via Unsplash.com.

“This pumping station in Hillsborough just flooded a few weeks ago. A lot of sewage was dumped into the river. That’s why this site was picked to receive funds to move out of the floodplain. This isn’t red team or blue team stuff – it’s about keeping sewage out of our drinking water. I hope we can all agree on that,” said state Attorney General Jeff Jackson, a Democrat

North Carolina officials visited the Hillsborough River Pumping Station earlier this week to emphasize the state’s potential losses after the Trump administration canceled more than $200 million in disaster prevention grants.

According to the North Carolina Department of Justice, the Hillsborough River Pumping Station.

Located in the state’s Piedmont region, the Hillsborough River Pumping Station has received an estimated $7 million to move its facility away from an at-risk floodplain, ensuring that emergency water connections remain intact in the event of a natural catastrophe.

“This pumping station in Hillsborough just flooded a few weeks ago. A lot of sewage was dumped into the river. That’s why this site was picked to receive funds to move out of the floodplain. This isn’t red team or blue team stuff – it’s about keeping sewage out of our drinking water. I hope we can all agree on that,” said state Attorney General Jeff Jackson, a Democrat. “FEMA broke the law when they canceled these funds, and I’m going to court to get them back for North Carolina.”

Jackson’s office estimates that Hillsborough is one of at least 60 projects statewide that received funding from the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, or BRIC, which was established during President Donald Trump’s first term in office.

President Donald J. Trump. Photo by Michael Vadon, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0

In a statement issued late last week, a FEMA official described BRIC as “another example of a wasteful and ineffective … program. It was more concerned with climate change than helping Americans effected [sic] by natural disasters.”

Some Trump administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, have already stated that their long-term goal is to eliminate FEMA in its entirety.

“We’re going to eliminate FEMA,” Noem said in a March statement.

In the past, FEMA had touted BRIC and other disaster prevention programs as a resounding success, saying that they help states, cities, and tribal governments “reduce their hazard risk” while also building “capacity and capability.”

But, in a two-page memo authorizing the end of BRIC, the agency’s current acting director said that the grants “have not increased the level of hazard mitigation as much as desired, and may supplant state, local, tribal and territorial capital investment planning.”

“With that in mind, I am providing a new direction for the BRIC Program,” said FEMA acting administrator Cameron Hamilton.

Hamilton’s memo states that the agency will evaluate “all existing grants and their priorities, scope, and implementation timelines,” with the intent of complying with a March 19 executive order shifting the financial burden of disaster preparedness from the federal government to state governments.

Around the same time that FEMA announced the termination of BRIC funds, it also removed a notice announcing $600 million in grants through another agency program, the Flood Mitigation Assistance program.