Every federal dollar spent on disaster mitigation in the United States saves an estimated six dollars in recovery and response. Now, when billion-dollar climate and weather disasters occur nationally not three times a year, as they did fifty years ago, but about once every three weeks, adaptation is more important than ever. Disasters will continue to get more intense and expensive. More homes will enter the floodplain as sea levels rise and storms intensify. Away from the coasts, more of the country will face tornadoes and wildfires. Already, an insurability crisis threatens millions of American homes that are too risky for private insurance companies to cover.

In light of all this, it might seem like the country should invest in preparation, but under the Trump administration, the opposite is taking place. Instead of researching to better predict weather events like hurricanes and natural trends like erosion, the administration has proposed cutting the research arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—a move that, like the proposed elimination of the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Research and Development, is rooted in a desire to deny climate change by refusing to study it. The administration has also removed a coastal-erosion predictor from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) website, making it more difficult for homebuyers, business owners, and communities to assess the risks they face. Instead of funding local emergency management to help endangered communities prepare evacuation plans, the administration has frozen hundreds of millions of dollars in FEMA grants across nineteen states. This includes funding for emergency managers and disaster relief for events like Hawaii’s massive 2023 wildfires. After receiving orders from the court to reinstate FEMA funding, the administration has slow-walked the process, claiming that funds aren’t “frozen” but are merely being reviewed for waste, fraud, and abuse.

During the past three months, the Trump administration’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has fired thousands of workers at NOAA, proposed defunding ocean research and satellite tracking, suggested it might dismantle FEMA altogether, and cut the agency’s largest climate-adaptation program, the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program. BRIC was labeled “wasteful and ineffective” because it was supposedly “more concerned with political agendas than helping Americans affected by natural disasters.” But the resiliency efforts it supported—including reviving coastal ecosystems that absorb flooding, upgrading power stations, and updating building codes—were not particularly ideological. Preventing homes from being destroyed in the first place is the best, most efficient way to help homeowners. The supposed “political agenda” may refer to the program’s effort to prioritize grants for the most adversely affected communities, which are low-income. Or it may simply refer to the fact that the program’s very existence presupposes the reality of climate change and acknowledges that communities across the country are trying to prepare for it.

Underscoring the administration’s retrograde approach, FEMA announced it was ending an Obama-era rule called the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard on March 25. The rule required flooded communities to rebuild to updated standards that reduced their future flood risk. Rebuilding houses according to those strict codes is indeed slower and more expensive, but only in the short term—in the end, it is far more expensive to rebuild over and over again. The solution to disaster-stricken communities’ struggles with high costs and slow implementation is not to cancel the program, but to make it easier to access funds or to offer buyouts where flood risk is too high. Here as elsewhere, the administration hopes to avoid a problem by sticking its head in the sand—in this case, on a disappearing beach.