Updated: This article was updated to include a statement from a FEMA spokesperson.
Aaron Olson first learned in January 2020 that the federal government might help pay for a new tornado shelter for the 670-student school district he oversees in rural, southwest Wisconsin.
One pandemic, two presidential elections, one federal lawsuit, and more than six years later, it still hasn’t happened.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency in August 2022 selected the Cuba City district for an infrastructure grant meant to limit damage from natural disasters.
Superintendent Olson and his team spent the next three years working through the paperwork for the district to secure the money—only for the Trump administration last year to revoke the grant, and cancel the entire program through which the grant was awarded, the Building Resilient Infrastructure in Communities, or BRIC, program. Olson found out from news reports.
A federal judge halted the program’s cancellation last December. In March, the same judge ordered FEMA to swiftly restore all the funds it had pulled.
More than a month-and-a-half has gone by since then. Olson’s district still doesn’t have the money, and the prospects for getting the project done remain dim.
No significant tornados have hit Cuba City in recent years—but the district’s position in the Midwestern region known as Tornado Alley means that could change at any time.
“We should have had this done already,” Olson said of building the shelter. “All of us would feel horrible if something happened and people were injured or worse.”
In a statement to Education Week, a FEMA spokesperson said the agency was conducting a “methodical evaluation of the program to ensure that every dollar spent is serving the interests of Americans.”
“Now that the evaluation is complete, FEMA is moving forward with its plans to reconstitute the BRIC program in a way that reflects good stewardship of taxpayer money,” the statement says.
That effort was delayed, FEMA says, by the recently concluded four-month shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. “We are grateful that FEMA’s funding has been restored, and we can focus on getting resources to the communities that need them,” the statement says.
A yearslong wait for promised grant funds
FEMA launched the BRIC program in 2020 during the first Trump administration to support construction projects that proactively mitigate the risks of damage from natural disasters.
Under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, signed into law by then-President Joe Biden, Congress appropriated $1 billion for the BRIC program. The FEMA website lists example projects including “school safe rooms, utility hardening, relocating critical facilities out of flood areas, and securing pump stations.”
Both of the Cuba City district’s school buildings were built in 1960. Every room has an exterior window. K-5 classrooms all lie on the outer edge of the circular elementary building, making them vulnerable to tornado damage.
“There’s only so many bathrooms you can shove kids in,” Olson said. “We feel nervous every time.”
But Wisconsin is one of 11 states that supplies virtually no state aid for school building repairs and improvements. Garnering local support for raising taxes is often districts’ only option. And the cost of building storm shelters in particular has risen in recent years after neighboring Minnesota began requiring every new school building or school construction project adding space for more than 50 students to have one.
The Cuba City district first applied for the BRIC grant in late 2020. FEMA rejected the initial application—but the district’s grants consultant believed the agency had applied the selection criteria incorrectly, and offered to submit another application at no additional charge to the district.
The plan was to build a new gym that would double as a storm shelter. Funding for the gym would come from a $27 million building referendum, which local voters approved in November 2022. The $8.8 million BRIC grant would pay for the storm shelter components.
The project was also slated to include a building extension with a technical education classroom and a fitness center.
Work was scheduled to begin on Sept. 1, 2022—but a few weeks before that, FEMA staff told Olson they couldn’t put shovels in the ground until the agency had fully approved the project.
“Three years we were told, ‘You’re about a week away from getting final clearance,’” Olson said. “In those three years, we couldn’t do anything.”
In the meantime, community members started to get antsy. The district had promised a new building, but nothing new was cropping up.
“We were like, ‘Wait a minute, we’re waiting on getting possibly $8 million from the federal government to make our communities safer,’” Olson said. “They didn’t want to hear that.”
Faced with insufficient state funding, the Cuba City district has since asked local voters three more times to approve tax increases to pay for operational costs like teacher salaries. The first two, totaling nearly $9 million, failed to secure majority support. The last one, for $7 million in November 2025, succeeded.
The district is part of a growing statewide trend of reliance on voter-approved tax increases to keep up with rising costs. In the case of Cuba City, Olson hesitates to blame the community for being reluctant. Expenses have grown much faster than state aid to cover them.
The district’s annual operating budget is just shy of $23 million. In one post-pandemic year, the district’s health insurance costs alone shot up by 90 percent, from $1.2 million to $2.3 million.
“In a small district, that’s rough,” Olson said.
30 school districts participate in BRIC-funded projects
Applying for the BRIC grant was far from simple.
Jordan Buss is a Wisconsin-based grants consultant who helped more than a dozen school districts, including Cuba City, secure BRIC funding.
Each application took six to 10 months to develop, Buss said. Then, once FEMA selected a project, it had to go through several rounds of environmental, historic preservation, and compliance reviews—often without much communication about the process or timeline.
“FEMA historically has never been the greatest at communicating what the status is,” Buss said. “It’s kind of a black hole when you go through that process.”
At least 30 school districts across 14 states were either awarded BRIC funding or are participating in a larger project supported by a BRIC grant, according to an Education Week analysis of federal grant data.
One project in the latter category was the Goldendale Community Preparedness Microgrid in southern Washington state, near the Oregon border. Klickitat Valley Health, a nonprofit clinic, partnered with the Goldendale school district to plan a solar array, battery storage setup, and tsunami barricade for the school buildings and local hospital.
The project was inspired by a wildfire that swept through the area in 2013. Goldendale High School served as the command center for the state’s emergency management operation.
The BRIC-funded microgrid project was set to equip the school—and two others in the district—to serve as a shelter in a future disaster, relieving some of the pressure on the hospital, the only other structure in the area with a backup generator.
The project got its first of two rounds of BRIC grant funding in the second half of 2024. The application process “was incredibly daunting,” said Jonathan Lewis, director of support services for the clinic and the project director.
The design phase was close to wrapping up when the Trump administration canceled the remaining funding.
Trump admin. calls BRIC ‘wasteful and ineffective’
On April 4, 2025, FEMA issued a press release announcing that it would deny all outstanding applications for BRIC grants and return all unspent funds from the program to the U.S. Treasury.
“The BRIC program was yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program,” the release said. “It was more concerned with political agendas than helping Americans affected by natural disasters.”
Three months later, on July 16, 20 Democratic state attorneys general filed a federal lawsuit, arguing that the Trump administration violated the law and the Constitution by unilaterally canceling the program.
On Dec. 11, a judge sided with the plaintiffs, calling the cancellation “unlawful executive encroachment.” A follow-up order on March 6 called for FEMA to, by the end of the month, begin accepting applications for new BRIC grants and lay out a timeline for reversing grant terminations.
In the meantime, Lewis and his team in Goldendale scaled back the project and removed the school buildings from the design.
Could the project get back on track now that a court has restored the funding? Not necessarily. Lewis said the latest he’s heard from FEMA is that the effort to restore funds is delayed because of additional federal turmoil.
FEMA abruptly dismissed 1,000 temporary disaster workers in January, triggering a lawsuit. FEMA’s parent agency, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, was shut down without an operating budget between mid-February and early May. Trump fired DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in early March; her replacement, Markwayne Mullin, was confirmed by the Senate later that month.
FEMA itself, long beset by staffing shortages, has cycled through three acting administrators during Trump’s second term, including one whom Trump reportedly intends to nominate for the permanent role even though Trump dismissed him last May for disagreeing with the president’s stated goal of eliminating the agency altogether.
The situation has dampened BRIC grantees’ hopes of promptly getting their projects back on track.
“There will be considerable redesign required if we do get FEMA funding,” Lewis said. “The one-year delay has been brutal.”
Funding delay forces major changes to project plans
Olson’s district in Cuba City also changed course in the wake of the grant cancellation.
After FEMA canceled the grant, Olson met with the school board, and they agreed: “We’re not waiting any longer.” Construction on the gym, sans storm shelter, began later that month.
While the grant was in limbo, the district figured out it could incorporate a storm shelter into a school performing arts center that had been on the community’s wish list for years.
In late March, after the court order for restoring BRIC funds, the Wisconsin emergency management agency emailed Olson, asking if his district still wants the federal grant funding.
If it does, the agency said, there’s a catch: The original “performance period” for the district’s BRIC grant expires this September, and it’s not clear whether FEMA would approve a request to extend it so the district would have more time to complete the work.
Olson followed up with another concern: Given the circumstances, will FEMA allow the district to build a different safe room than the one originally laid out in the project plans?
These questions kicked off another waiting period of nearly a month. Finally, on April 30, a FEMA staffer confirmed to Olson that the agency would consider granting the time extension and approving the new structure.
But the staffer offered no assurances, nor a timeline.
During the period when community members were wary of the district’s referendum proposals, “some people told us, ‘You’re never getting a dollar of that FEMA money,’” Olson said. “Maybe they’re natural pessimists or maybe they knew something I didn’t.”
