8/15/25: Austin American-Statesman: Opinion: Congress must stop Trump’s rollback of lifesaving flood protections
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Congress must stop Trump’s rollback of lifesaving flood protections
Scrapping these rules will cost Texans dearly in lives, homes and higher taxes
By Ben Smilowitz, Guest columnist
Aug 15, 2025
The tragic flooding in Central Texas last month that killed at least 136 people was no isolated incident. Texas regularly experiences catastrophic flooding, and Camp Mystic experienced dangerous flooding on multiple occasions.
Just last year, Hurricane Beryl showed that 500-year floods are happening somewhere nearly every year. Highways vanished under water. Flights were canceled. About 2.7 million homes and businesses lost power. Texans burned through ice, fuel and vacation days while waiting for pumps and paperwork.
A coastal rancher in Matagorda and a teacher in Wimberley share the same sinking feeling every spring: They’re stuck in a vicious cycle of flooding and rebuilding. And Washington, D.C. usually cuts the check to mop schools, reestablish essential utilities and pour fresh asphalt to replace roads. Then the next storm erases these costly repairs, and Texans pay for it all again — first by paying federal taxes, followed by higher local levies and jaw-dropping home insurance bills.
We can break this cycle and prevent economic loss and human suffering — if Congress blocks the Trump Administration’s efforts to dismantle federal flood prevention and rebuilding standards that were designed to save lives and reduce the economic impact of future floods.
For the last few years, federal dollars for reconstruction came with a common-sense guardrail called the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard (FFRMS). The rule required that any entity spending U.S. money in a flood zone — on a bridge, clinic, wastewater lift station or public housing, for instance — must build at least 2 feet higher than yesterday’s high-water mark.
Unfortunately, in January, President Donald Trump issued an executive order scrapping that protection under the guise of reducing costs to developers. The rescission of the rule is expected in a few months, although agency-level policies at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development could take longer to unwind.
If Congress allows the full rescission of these rules, more flooding costs will be directly passed onto Texans. The National Institute of Building Sciences found that for every federal dollar spent on proven mitigation efforts — such as higher elevation, stronger building codes and modern drainage — about $11 is saved down the line in avoided disaster recovery costs.
Elevating a structure by 2 feet costs pennies on the dollar for concrete and rebar, while skipping it means Texas homeowners are on the hook for costly repairs when the next flood hits.
When private coverage and FEMA aid fall short, counties are often forced to borrow millions of dollars to rebuild the same washed-out roads, locking residents into decades of debt for asphalt that may not survive the next hurricane season.
Texas lawmakers in Washington talk tough about fiscal restraint. Yet their inaction feeds one of the most expensive subsidies in America: rebuilding known high-risk flood plains at elevations that have flooded before and will flood again.
Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, along with Texas’ U.S. Reps. Michael McCaul, Chip Roy, Dan Crenshaw and Sylvia Garcia, serve on key committees overseeing the budgets of FEMA, HUD and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The razor-thin majorities in the both chambers mean that each senator and representative has the swing votes to save Texans from preventable deadly flood damage by:
- Restoring the 2-foot standard for every Texas building project that receives federal dollars.
- Requiring FEMA to update coastal and river flood maps at least every five years using LIDAR and current rainfall data, so builders aren’t working from decades-old lines.
- Increasing funding for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, which already delivers Texas communities $6 in avoided damage for every $1 spent.
These steps won’t stop the rain, but they would keep schools open, highways dry and small-town budgets intact. Most importantly, this would shift the focus from constant cleanup to proactive and smarter building and planning — something that public-private partnerships in Houston are voluntarily doing to reduce the risks from flood damage.
The Texas delegation in Washington must advocate to keep flood protections intact so Texas will not continue to suffer preventable catastrophic loss of life and economic impact after future inevitable flooding.
Ben Smilowitz is an attorney and executive director of the Disaster Accountability Project and SmartResponse.org, a nonprofit improving effectiveness and efficiency in disaster relief and humanitarian aid.