FEMA eases floodplain construction rules, citing cost savings and faster recovery from natural disasters. Experts express concerns over decreased safety standards for federally funded projects, as climate change increases risk of extreme rainfall. Local officials are unsure how the changes will impact rebuilding efforts.
FloodNC.gov photo
The move will speed up the pace of recovery from storms and disasters like Hurricane Helene, which ripped through Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee in September 2024.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is no longer enforcing certain rules around rebuilding in floodplains as a Trump administration decision rolls some federal funding criteria back to pre-Obama administration standards.
Blue Ridge Public Radio (BPR) in North Carolina reported April 1, 2025, that the change is expected to impact large infrastructure construction and publicly funded building projects — like schools — after a natural disaster.
In addition, the agency loosens regulations around construction elevation for facilities like water systems, federally funded housing and other public works projects. Many layers of local, state and federal requirements still apply under FEMA programs that help homeowners and businesses rebuild via loans or grants.
A press release from FEMA, issued March 25, 2025, noted that the move will speed up the pace of recovery from storms and disasters like Hurricane Helene, which ripped through Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee in September 2024.
"Stopping implementation will reduce the total timeline to rebuild in disaster-impacted communities and eliminate additional costs previously required to adhere to these strict requirements," according to FEMA.
The floodplain rules come from the federal Flood Risk Management Standard, which Trump rescinded by executive order on Jan. 20, 2025. Funding criteria under prior rules required federal agencies to evaluate weather patterns and analyze whether 500- and 100-year floodplains could shift due to climate change and to consider that before committing taxpayer money toward rebuilding.
Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, said rebuilding to the 100-year floodplain level was the norm before Obama-era changes. The rules that the Trump administration have rolled back will no longer require federally funded projects to be rebuilt 2 ft. above floodplain elevation. It also strikes a requirement that critical facilities like fire stations or hospitals be built 3 ft. above the floodplain elevation level.
The standard, Berginnis told BPR News, based in Helene-ravaged Asheville, N.C., was intended to ensure expensive rebuilding projects — funded by taxpayers — do not get destroyed when the next flood hits.
"Why on Earth would the federal government want it to be rebuilt to a lower standard and waste our money so that when the flood hits [and] it gets destroyed again, we're spending yet more money to rebuild it," he said.
"You're going to have storm sewers overwhelmed," Berginnis added. "You're going to have basins that were designed to hold a certain kind of flood that don't do it anymore, like retention ponds. You're going to have bridges that no longer can pass through that water like [they] used to. You have all of this infrastructure that's designed for an older event."
Josh Harrold, the town manager of Black Mountain, N.C., another community that felt the wrath of the hurricane, told BPR the old climate consideration rules were not an onerous part of rebuilding projects.
"We know this is going to happen again," he said. "The scale of that is up in the air. No one knows what that's going to be like, but we are, you know, taking the approach [that] we just don't want to build it back exactly like it was. We want to build it back differently."
Harrold and other local and state officials contacted by BPR said they do not yet know how the Trump order will impact their projects.
The changes come as some municipalities are adopting and refining stricter floodplain rebuilding rules.
For instance, the city of Asheville adopted ordinance amendments in January to comply with the National Flood Insurance Program's rebuilding requirements, and it is unclear how this new rule change will affect that process. Asheville municipal officials did not respond to a request from BPR for comment.
Berginnis said communities may not see immediate results from this change, but the effects will be felt in the future if leaders bypass additional flood protection in their rebuilding process.
"Everything that gets rebuilt using federal funds will be less safe when the next flood comes," Berginnis said. "And even though in Western [North] Carolina, it has been a long time since you've had a big flood, it doesn't mean that it can't happen next month or next year."
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