Biden-Harris Administrations Announces Nearly $3 Billion in Project Selections to Help Communities Build Resilience to Climate Change and Extreme Weather Events
Additional Funding from the President’s Investing in America Agenda Enables Major Program Expansion, with 23 States Selected for the First Time
WASHINGTON—Today, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, and Senior Advisor to the President and White House Infrastructure Coordinator Mitch Landrieu announced the project selections for nearly $3 billion in climate resilience funding as part of President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, a key pillar of Bidenomics. The selections, through two competitive grant programs, will help communities across the nation enhance resilience to climate change and extreme weather events. Overall, the President’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides FEMA nearly $7 billion to help communities proactively reduce their vulnerability to flood, hurricanes, drought, wildfires, extreme heat, and other climate-fueled hazards.
JACKSON, Miss. — When the coronavirus first scythed through the nation in early 2020, few places needed help fighting it more than Scott County, Miss., a rural patch of chicken processing plants and pine forests an hour east of the state capital, Jackson.
The poverty rate for the county’s 28,000 residents was far above the nation’s. So, too, were rates of diabetes and other chronic illnesses that worsen the risk of severe Covid-19. Yet Mississippi’s health department, struggling under huge budget cuts ordered by the state’s Legislature, had deployed just two nurse practitioners to cover a quarter-million residents in Scott and eight other counties.