DOGE Hits the Chesapeake Bay

 Bay Journal, FEMA cancels $1 billion for flood prevention projects in Chesapeake Bay region

As Crisfield Mayor Darlene Taylor sees it, the low-lying Maryland town has no future unless it can hold back rising water. Computer models suggest that the adjacent Chesapeake Bay could get high enough by 2050 to trigger daily floods that are deep enough to stall cars on roads.

"Could" is doing some heavy lifting here. At the current rate of sea level rise/ground subsidence of about 3 mm per year, which shows no sign of increasing, it should be a long time before the water reaches the engines of cars. But they always reference the wildest, least realistic estimates of future sea level rise.

Hope arrived in the form of a federal grant program under the Federal Emergency Management Agency, created during the first Trump administration. The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program helped rural communities like hers to invest in massive projects to fight disaster threats, ranging from wildfires to floods.

Crisfield officially got word from FEMA last July that it had secured $36 million from the program to launch the first phase of its massive flood-protection initiative. “Everything had lined up and everything was in place for this to be a highly successful project,” Taylor said.

A lot has changed since then. Trump returned to office in January, vowing to drastically shrink the size of the federal government. In a terse April 4 press statement, FEMA announced it was pulling the plug on the disaster-preparedness funding, not just for Crisfield but for all applicants and grantees, calling it “wasteful and ineffective,” though without citing evidence to support those claims.

The administration announced that any undistributed funds from the program’s inaugural year, 2020, through 2023 would be returned to the Disaster Relief Fund or the U.S. Treasury. The agency also canceled the 2024 funding opportunity, just days before the application deadline for that year’s $750 million allocation.

If Crisfield want's to stay where it is, maybe they should look into what it would take to prepare for floods. 

At the Capital Gazette,  Maryland lawmakers fear deep EPA cuts could cripple Chesapeake Bay restoration

Maryland lawmakers are waiting warily for an Environmental Protection Agency budget that they fear could cut staff so deeply that the Chesapeake Bay restoration program could not adequately proceed. The full budget release, expected in the coming weeks, will follow the agency’s “skinny budget”—essentially a broad budget outline — unveiled in early May and proposed cutting more than half of the agency’s $9.1 billion budget. The Trump administration’s EPA budget request for the 2026 federal fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, was for $4.2 billion.

“I don’t know how we actually implement the Bay program — even it’s fully funded, which I have no reason to believe it will be when we get the final details — when we’ve taken a chainsaw to staffing,” Rep. Sarah Elfreth, a Maryland Democrat, said in an interview Tuesday.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen during a Senate Appropriations hearing last week that he supported the bay program, which is currently funded at $92 million a year. “The Chesapeake Bay Program is an amazing program. Our team takes great pride in running it,” Zeldin said in response to Van Hollen’s questions.

There's no government program that couldn't benefit from a 20% cut, some much more, and some should be eliminated entirely.