Five days ago, the largest climate resilience grants competition in the country closed. FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program stopped accepting applications at 3 p.m. Eastern on July 23, 2026, ending a 120-day window that moved $1 billion in federal mitigation funding. If you missed it, the reflex is to write off the year. That read is wrong, and the reason it is wrong is sitting in a federal court file in Massachusetts.

BRIC Closed July 23. The Court Order Behind It Did Not.

The BRIC window that just shut was not a routine annual cycle. It was a remedy. In April 2025, then-acting FEMA leadership canceled the program outright, calling it “wasteful and ineffective,” and froze roughly $3.6 billion covering several years of pre-disaster mitigation projects. Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia sued. On December 11, 2025, the court granted summary judgment for the states, vacated the termination, and permanently enjoined FEMA from reinstating it under any other name.

FEMA moved slowly. By February 2026, the plaintiff states filed a motion to enforce, noting in their memorandum to the court that OpenFEMA data showed zero BRIC projects awarded between the December ruling and February 9, 2026. Judge Richard G. Stearns granted that motion on March 6 and gave FEMA 21 days to publish a FY2024 NOFO. FEMA published on March 25 — nineteen days later.

That sequence matters more than the deadline you missed. It establishes that the timing of climate resilience grants at FEMA is currently supervised by a judge, and that the agency responds to specific dates in court orders rather than to its own historical calendar. If you want to know when the next window opens, the docket is a better predictor than the program page.

The Two NOFOs a Judge Already Put on the Clock

Buried in the March 6 enforcement order is the part almost nobody covering the BRIC reopening reported. The court did not just order a FY2024 NOFO. It ordered FEMA to file a status report identifying when it expects to issue a Fiscal Year 2025 BRIC NOFO and a Fiscal Year 2026 BRIC NOFO, both explicitly tied to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Pub. L. 117-58) and 42 U.S.C. § 5133(f).

That statutory citation is the load-bearing part. The IIJA appropriated $200 million per year for pre-disaster mitigation across fiscal years 2022 through 2026, on top of the standing 6% set-aside from disaster relief spending that Section 5133 already authorizes. The money for FY2025 and FY2026 is not a budget request someone can decline to make. It is appropriated, it is statutorily directed to this purpose, and a federal judge has already ruled once that FEMA cannot decline to spend it.

Practically, that means two more BRIC competitions are far more likely than not within the next twelve to eighteen months, and the FY24/25 cycle that just closed consumed only part of the backlog. Organizations that treat July 23 as the end of the road will be caught flat-footed when a FY2025 NOFO drops with another 90 to 120 day clock. Organizations that spend the gap on benefit-cost analysis and engineering design will not. If you are tracking federal grant programs across agencies, this is the rare case where litigation is a leading indicator.

Flood Mitigation Assistance Is Open for Nine More Days

While BRIC gets the headlines, its sibling program is still live. FEMA reissued the FY2024 Flood Mitigation Assistance NOFO on April 30, 2026 — it had been rescinded on April 7, 2025 in the same sweep that killed BRIC — and made up to $600 million available. The application deadline is Thursday, August 6, 2026 at 3 p.m. Eastern.

FMA is narrower than BRIC. It funds projects that reduce repetitive flood damage to structures insured under the National Flood Insurance Program, which means eligibility runs through NFIP participation and a FEMA-approved local hazard mitigation plan. It is also real money moving: FEMA announced more than $235 million in FMA awards, including Swift Current, on April 22, 2026.

The subapplicant deadlines already passed in most states

Here is the trap that catches first-time applicants. Local governments and nonprofits do not apply to FEMA. States do. Local entities apply as subapplicants through their State Hazard Mitigation Officer, and states set internal deadlines well ahead of FEMA’s. Oregon’s subapplicant deadline was July 27. Nevada’s was July 6. Maine’s was July 6. The August 6 date on FEMA’s website is the date your state submits, not the date you do.

If you are outside that chain today, the honest answer for FMA FY2024 is that the door is closed unless your state agency says otherwise. Call your SHMO anyway. Some states hold capacity when ranked subapplications fall out during review, and getting into the queue now positions you for the next cycle.

The Rule Changes That Outlived the Cancellation

FEMA did not simply restore the old BRIC. The March 2026 reissue rewrote eligibility in ways that persist into whatever FY2025 and FY2026 look like, and they reward a different kind of applicant than the pre-2025 program did.

• No money for hazard mitigation plans. Funding for new local plans and plan updates was removed. Since an approved plan is a precondition for most FEMA mitigation awards, communities without one now have to pay for it themselves before they can compete.
• Capability and capacity building is tethered. C&CB activities must tie directly to infrastructure resilience. There is no minimum C&CB spend required to access allocation funds, and no standalone capacity grants.
• Project cap cut to $20 million. The maximum federal share per project in the national competition dropped from $50 million to $20 million.
• 15% applicant cap. No single applicant can take more than 15% of total available funding — a direct response to criticism that BRIC concentrated in a handful of coastal states.
• Scoring weight for newcomers. New applicants and subapplicants get scoring credit, as do impoverished communities.
• Readiness beats ambition. Projects “ready to implement” are prioritized, and the national competition evaluation was collapsed into a single 100-point scale with no national review panel.

Read together, those changes favor a mid-sized applicant with a shovel-ready hardening project and no prior BRIC award over a large state agency with a visionary regional plan. That is a meaningful shift for smaller municipalities and the nonprofits that partner with them, though the loss of planning money cuts the other way for communities starting from zero. Anyone building a nonprofit funding strategy around resilience work should assume design and analysis costs come out of pocket now.

Where Climate Resilience Grants Sit Between FEMA Windows

FEMA is the biggest channel, not the only one. Three others are worth mapping while you wait.

NOAA and NFWF. The National Coastal Resilience Fund, primarily funded by NOAA and administered by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, ran pre-proposals in March 2026 and invited full proposals in June, with awards announced late November to early December. Planning and design awards typically land between $100,000 and $1.5 million; restoration implementation awards run $1 million to $7 million. The 2027 pre-proposal window will open in late winter, which is exactly when a BRIC FY2025 NOFO might also be live.

Bipartisan Infrastructure Law coastal programs. NOAA’s transformational habitat restoration and coastal resilience competitions have run rounds with $100 million and $20 million available, with a tribal and underserved-community track carrying a lower $75,000 floor. These are cooperative agreements, not grants, which changes the reporting relationship but not the eligibility math.

State revolving and mitigation funds. Post-disaster Hazard Mitigation Grant Program allocations flow to states after declared disasters and are administered on state timelines that have nothing to do with the BRIC calendar. If your state has had a declaration in the last three years, there is likely an HMGP pool your SHMO is still obligating. State-level funding programs are consistently the least-searched and least-competitive layer of the resilience stack.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I still apply for BRIC after the July 23 deadline?

No. The FY24/25 BRIC application period closed at 3 p.m. ET on July 23, 2026, and FEMA GO stops accepting submissions at the timestamp. What you can do is prepare for the FY2025 and FY2026 competitions the court has ordered FEMA to schedule. That means finishing benefit-cost analysis, securing engineering design, confirming your jurisdiction’s hazard mitigation plan is current, and getting registered in SAM.gov and FEMA GO — registration alone can take up to four weeks.

Are climate resilience grants going away under the current administration?

The programs survived a termination attempt and a court challenge. BRIC reopened with $1 billion after the December 2025 summary judgment, and the FY2025 and FY2026 NOFOs are subject to ongoing court supervision. What changed is emphasis: FEMA’s framing dropped climate language in favor of infrastructure hardening and state responsibility. The eligible project types — safe rooms, utility hardening, flood buyouts, pump station protection — are largely the same.

Who is actually eligible to apply directly?

States, U.S. territories, the District of Columbia, and federally recognized Tribal Nations apply directly to FEMA. Local governments, special districts, and most nonprofits participate as subapplicants routed through their State Hazard Mitigation Officer. Federally recognized tribes can choose either path. If you are not a state agency, your real deadline is your state’s internal one.

What is the single biggest reason resilience applications fail?

Documentation timing, not project merit. Benefit-cost ratios below 1.0, expired or missing local hazard mitigation plans, incomplete NFIP participation records, and FEMA GO registrations started too late account for a large share of withdrawals. All four are fixable months in advance and unfixable in the final week.

Does missing this cycle hurt my chances next time?

Not under the current scoring. The FY24/25 NOFO gave scoring credit to new applicants and subapplicants, and the 15% cap limits how much any repeat winner can absorb. A first-time applicant with a ready-to-build project is in a better structural position now than at any point in BRIC’s history.

Bottom Line: Build the Subapplication Before the NOFO Exists

The usual advice after a missed deadline is to sign up for alerts. That is the wrong move here, because the constraint on climate resilience grants is not awareness — FEMA published a press release, the AP covered it, and states ran webinars. The constraint is that a BRIC or FMA subapplication requires a benefit-cost analysis, an engineering design package, a current hazard mitigation plan, and an active FEMA GO registration, and none of those can be assembled inside a 30-day state deadline.

So do the inverse. Treat the next nine days as an FMA long shot worth one phone call to your SHMO, and treat the following six months as build time for a FY2025 BRIC subapplication that does not yet have a number. Get the BCA done. Get the design to 30%. Confirm your plan’s approval date and expiration. Register in SAM.gov and FEMA GO now, not when the NOFO drops. When the court forces the next window open, the applicants who win will be the ones who were already finished.

If you want help scoping which resilience programs your organization can actually qualify for — and which state channel routes you to them — OpenGrants’ grant writing services can run the eligibility and readiness assessment before the next window opens. You can also search live mitigation and infrastructure opportunities in the OpenGrants funding database.