Today, the Trump administration published a proposed rule that would eviscerate the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Federal Flood Risk Management Standard (FFRMS), erasing years of progress to modernize how federally funded buildings, affordable housing and infrastructure are built to withstand current and future flooding made worse by fossil-fueled climate change. Separately, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has also stopped implementing that agency’s FFRMS, although it has yet to propose rulemaking to officially reverse it. Both actions follow from an executive order issued by President Donald Trump last year.
HUD’s proposed rule will mean that new buildings, facilities and homes financed by the federal government could be at increased risk of flooding, including from hurricanes, sea level rise and severe weather super-charged by climate change.
“Flooding from climate-driven heavy rainfall, sea level rise and hurricanes is taking an increasingly heavy toll on communities, yet the Trump administration again wants to ignore reality and the latest science,” said Shana Udvardy, senior climate resilience policy analyst with the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). “This rollback returns us to antiquated minimum standards developed decades ago and uninformed by the latest climate science. This head-in-the-sand approach to flood risk will unnecessarily put new buildings, facilities, and people’s homes at risk of flooding, disproportionately harming low-income residents, people of color, the elderly and those with disabilities while costing taxpayer more.”
If this proposed rule is finalized, it would keep residents of HUD-financed housing at risk of repeated flooding, increase costs to the federal government from repeated flood damages, worsen the federal government’s climate change-related financial risk, and reduce awareness of flood risk among tenants and homeowners.
Previously, the FFRMS rule applied a Climate Informed Science Approach requiring the assessment of future flood risk including sea level rise and heavy rainfall when siting, designing and renovating HUD-financed projects in the floodplain. This ensured HUD was proactively anticipating future flood risk through climate-informed analysis, implementing higher construction standards and enforcing requirements to steer development away from high-risk areas.