The numbers from the Department of Government Efficiency’s grant termination campaign are not abstract policy — they represent real programs, real services, and real organizations trying to figure out how to continue operating.
As of February 2026, DOGE-linked termination actions have reached 15,887 grants totaling approximately $49 billion in rescinded federal funding. The scope spans virtually every domestic discretionary grant program: FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program eliminated entirely, NIH grants cut by the billions, EPA environmental justice awards rescinded, HUD community development funding frozen. The pace of terminations has exceeded what any grant management system or organizational planning process was built to absorb.
The organizations that survive this disruption won’t just be the ones with strong reserves or powerful political relationships. They’ll be the ones that use this moment to build funding strategies that don’t depend on any single federal source.
What Actually Happened to BRIC
FEMA’s BRIC program deserves specific attention because it was one of the largest pre-disaster hazard mitigation grant programs in federal history. Authorized under the Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018, BRIC had funded over $5.6 billion in infrastructure resilience projects — building codes upgrades, flood mitigation, wildfire risk reduction, critical facility hardening — across hundreds of jurisdictions.
The program was terminated in early 2026. Projects that had been approved but not yet fully executed had their funding withdrawn. Projects in planning phases lost their federal commitment. State and local governments that had structured multi-year resilience investments around BRIC funding were left with infrastructure commitments, consultant contracts, and community expectations — and no federal dollars.
The elimination wasn’t just a budget cut. It was a retroactive change to the terms under which states and localities had made investment decisions. The administrative and legal challenges are ongoing. The practical planning reality for emergency managers is that BRIC funding cannot be relied upon in FY2026 or the foreseeable future regardless of how those challenges resolve.
The Strategic Response: Diversification Is Not Optional
Organizations and governments that had concentrated their resilience investment strategies around BRIC illustrate the broader vulnerability: excessive dependence on any single federal grant program creates existential risk when that program changes.
The response to DOGE’s disruption cannot simply be to pursue the surviving programs more aggressively — though that’s necessary in the short term. The sustainable response is structural diversification.
Map your full federal funding landscape. Most organizations and government entities have a partial picture of the federal programs they could access. A comprehensive mapping exercise — covering all relevant federal agencies, authorizing legislation, grant cycles, and eligibility requirements — often reveals significant untapped opportunities. This analysis is especially valuable right now because DOGE has created winners alongside losers. Programs that survived or were explicitly protected are now less competitive because competing organizations have lost funding and may have reduced capacity.
Pursue IIJA and IRA funding with urgency. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act created substantial grant and incentive structures with different political durability than BRIC. IIJA resilience funding through the Federal Highway Administration, the Army Corps of Engineers, and HUD’s Community Development Block Grant — Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) program has different statutory footing and has been less exposed to DOGE action. The same applies to IRA energy transition incentives. These aren’t substitutes for BRIC dollar-for-dollar, but they are viable funding sources that organizations with strong project pipelines can access.
Build state revolving fund and bond relationships. State environmental revolving funds (SRFs), state infrastructure banks, and municipal bond markets represent substantial financing capacity that doesn’t flow through federal discretionary grants. Resilience infrastructure that previously relied on BRIC grants may be financeable through revenue bonds, green bonds, or state revolving fund loans — at interest rates that, in many cases, remain manageable for project economics.
Develop private and philanthropic co-investment capacity. Many resilience investments create economic value that can attract private capital: flood mitigation that protects commercial real estate, energy resilience that reduces utility costs, transportation investments that improve logistics economics. Building the capacity to structure public-private co-investments — rather than treating every project as purely grant-funded — creates projects that are fundable without federal discretionary grants.
Cultivate Congressional relationships for emergency supplementals. Major disaster events have historically been followed by emergency supplemental appropriations that operate outside the normal discretionary budget process. Organizations with strong Congressional relationships are better positioned to access supplemental funding when it becomes available. This means engagement well before a disaster, not during the recovery.
The Practical Grant Management Response
Beyond strategy, there are immediate operational actions for organizations managing active grants in the current environment.
Audit your active award letters and performance periods. DOGE terminations have not followed consistent patterns. Some awards were terminated mid-performance; others near completion. Understanding exactly what your obligations and protections are requires reading your actual award documentation, not relying on program officer representations that may have been superseded by political decisions.
Document your compliance record comprehensively. If you believe your grant termination was improper — and many recipients are pursuing administrative appeals and litigation — your compliance record is the foundation of your case. This means organized documentation of all drawdowns, progress reports, deliverables, and correspondence.
Communicate proactively with beneficiaries and stakeholders. Organizations that have made commitments to communities or partners based on grant funding need to communicate changes as soon as they know them. The reputational damage of being caught flat-footed by grant termination — with no communication plan and no alternative funding identified — is compounding.
Engage your state emergency management agency. For BRIC specifically, state emergency management agencies are navigating the same disruption and some are exploring state-funded alternatives, different federal program alignments, or collective advocacy. Being in that conversation is better than managing the situation in isolation.
The Longer View
Federal grant funding has always been policy-contingent. DOGE’s actions are unprecedented in pace and scope, but the underlying vulnerability — building programs entirely around federal discretionary funding that a future administration could eliminate — is a structural problem that organizations should have been managing more carefully.
The disruption is severe. The organizations that come through it intact will be those that treat it as a forcing function for the strategic diversification they should have been building all along.