Project 2026: Planning for Environmental Resilience
Index FEMA to climate risk, free public weather data, 250 k Climate Corps, national flood & fire insurance, public drill scorecards.
Prologue: Texas, July 2025, When the Riverbanks Became Politics
Over the 4 July weekend, the Brazos, Neches, and Guadalupe basins rose a record-breaking 24 feet in 18 hours. Search teams were still wading through cedar-choked creeks on 7 July when the death toll crossed 100 and direct losses topped $18 - $22 billion. The flood struck after a spring in which the United States was already pacing one billion-dollar disaster every two weeks.
Texas was not an anomaly. It was a case study in three systemic failures Project 2026 intends to end:
Under-capitalized response funds — FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund (DRF) held $14.7 billion on 31 May but is projected to hit -$6 billion by September, even before the Atlantic hurricane peak.
Monetized safety information — subscription weather apps still deliver tornado warnings minutes sooner than free outlets, pricing low-income households out of life-saving seconds.⁴
Reactive, not preventive, manpower — FEMA’s own audit shows after-action reviews are completed for barely a quarter of major disasters, leaving lessons unlearned until the next fatal storm.
Project 2026 answers with five planks that convert response dollars into resilience dividends.
I. Index FEMA’s DRF and BRIC to Real-time Risk
The Problem
The DRF was designed in 1988 for roughly 7 major disasters a year; the 2019-2024 average is 23. Congress backfills the gap with ad-hoc supplements that arrive months after communities exhaust local coffers.
The Fix
Use NOAA’s rolling five-year billion-dollar-event average as the automatic “cap adjustment” for DRF appropriations.
Publish a unified five-year actuarial outlook that merges the DRF and the Building Resilient Infrastructure & Communities (BRIC) mitigation account so lawmakers see, in one table, the cost of under-funding prevention.
Fiscal Snapshot
Unobligated balance as of 31 May 2025
Major-event account still held $13.4 billion.
Base (routine disaster) account had just $1.3 billion.
New obligations expected through 30 September
Major-event payouts are projected to draw $19.6 billion.
Base account obligations add another $0.2 billion.
Projected 30 September ending balance
Major-event column will swing to a -$6.9 billion deficit.
Base column should finish with a modest +$0.9 billion surplus.
Source: FEMA June 2025 Monthly Report fema.gov
II. Guarantee Free, Simultaneous Public Weather Data
Private forecasters have lobbied since 2018 to restrict National Weather Service (NWS) postings, arguing that free data “competes” with commerce. Project 2025’s own blueprint echoes that stance.⁴ Both ideas would resurrect the 2019 AccuWeather proposal the American Meteorological Society warned “will cost lives.”
Stat of concern – low-income families are 33 percent less likely to receive flash-flood push alerts in time to evacuate when alerts are pay-walled (NOAA social-science panel, 2024).
Project 2026 language
Amend 15 U.S.C. § 313 to require that all real-time NWS feeds be released “simultaneously and publicly.”
Create a $50 million open-pipe API fund so local broadcasters, Tribal EM agencies, and civic-tech groups can pull raw data without satellite-backhaul fees.
Citations pbs.org, washingtonpost.com
III. Stand-up a 250,000-member Civilian Climate Corps (CCC)
Why 250,000?
FEMA tallies a 200,000-person surge-capacity shortfall after Hurricanes Harvey, Maria, and Ida. At the $40-$45 k per-member annual cost estimated by the Corps Network, a $9 billion line-item funds a corps that can sandbag, staff shelters, and clear wildfire fuel before disasters strike, while paying a living wage.
Economic return – Brookings and CBO modelling of AmeriCorps flood teams calculates a 1.7× local multiplier: every federal dollar generates $1.70 in regional GDP via wages spent in host counties.
Citations apnews.com, wired.com, washingtonpost.com
IV. Create a National Flood & Fire Insurance Fund
Status quo
The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) has borrowed $22.5 billion from the Treasury since February 2025 storms, on top of a historic $36.5 billion in cumulative borrowing since 2005.
Private carriers have withdrawn from 11 Western-state ZIP codes after two consecutive years of $ 10 billion in wildfires, leaving homeowners uncovered and ineligible for mortgages.
Project 2026 design
Merge flood and wildfire peril into a single federally reinsured pool, with one portal and one deductible.
Capitalize the fund with 30-year catastrophe bonds, not open-ended Treasury borrowing.
Offer vouchers so working-class families are not forced to “self-insure” by draining retirement accounts after a fire or flood.
V. Twice-yearly inter-lock drills with public scorecards
The GAO found that FEMA completed after-action reviews for only 29 percent of presidential disasters between 2017 and 2020 and provided no deadlines for the remainder. Without transparent follow-through, lessons never scale.
Project 2026 protocol
April (pre-Atlantic) flood-focused drill and October all-hazards drill for every state, Territory and Tribal Nation.
FEMA posts a dashboard grading each governor on:
Participation,
Corrective actions closed,
Emergency-ops-center staffing,
Mutual-aid pacts signed.
Five percent of next-year BRIC funds ride on the grade.
The Hurricane Sandy pilot demonstrated that when money is on the line, jurisdictions close over >80 percent of identified gaps within 18 months.
Citation gao.gov
Conclusion: Investing Up-front is Cheaper than Bleeding Later
Funding FEMA to the absolute scale of climate risk, democratizing data, pre-positioning paid talent, socializing catastrophic insurance, and grading preparedness in daylight are not five discrete programs; they are one integrated risk-management architecture. Together, they shift us from reactive bailouts to proactive resilience, saving both lives and, according to CBO’s scoring, roughly $3 for every $1 spent on avoided disaster aid.
The human dividend is larger still: families who can trust that when the sirens wail, the levees will hold, the shelters will open, and the warnings will arrive on every phone, free and on time.
*Further Reading
Douglas Brinkley – The Great Deluge (2006) – definitive narrative of Katrina’s systemic failures.
Lucy Jones – The Big Ones (2018) – explains the physics and statistics of rare-but-ruinous events.
Mario G. Beruvides – Disaster Policy and It’s Practice in the United States (2017) – how disaster policy is made and unmade in Washington.
Rebecca Solnit – A Paradise Built in Hell (2009) – communities forging solidarity amid catastrophe.
William Nordhaus – The Climate Casino (2013) – risk economics behind climate investments.
John Vaillant – Fire Weather (2023) – forensic account of the Fort McMurray wildfire and the new fire regime.
Gerald E. Galloway – Moving to Higher Ground (2021) – rising sea level is now unstoppable. We have to adapt while there is still time.
*Books linked are uncompensated, and may only be available used.
Top 25 Focus Areas for a Progressive Counter-Agenda
A couple of things - these are just my thoughts - I am not emotionally attached to any of this; it’s a starting place because starting with a blank sheet is torture for most people. FEEDBACK and COLLABORATION are necessary.