Trump reversed regulations to protect infrastructure against flooding just days before Hurricane Harvey

Eliza Relman
Aug. 28, 2017

Just 10 days before Hurricane Harvey descended upon Texas on Friday, wreaking havoc and widespread flooding, President Donald Trump signed an executive order revoking a set of regulations that would have made federally-funded infrastructure less vulnerable to flooding.

The Obama-era rules, which had not yet gone into effect, would have required the federal government to take into account the risk of flooding and sea-level rise as a result of climate change when constructing new infrastructure and rebuilding after disasters.

Experts are predicting Harvey — the most powerful storm to hit the US since 2004 — will cost Texas between $30 billion and $100 billion in damage.

And in the coming days, Congress will be called upon to send billions of federal dollars to help with the state's recovery and rebuilding efforts.

But because of Trump's rollback of Obama's Federal Flood Risk Management Standards, experts across the political spectrum say much of the federal money sent to Texas will likely be wasted on construction that will be insufficiently protected from the next storm.

"We will rebuild things that should not be rebuilt and ... in ways that are less safe and secure than they should be," Eli Lehrer, president of the DC free-market think tank R Street Institute, told Business Insider.

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