President Joe Biden approved the largest-ever investment to protect the nation against hurricanes, droughts, wildfires and other disasters being intensified by climate change.
Nearly three years later, the majority of that $33.6 billion remains unspent, POLITICO found in an analysis of federal data — a lag that imperils Biden’s hopes of building the nation’s resilience to the maladies of a warming world.
The money, provided by the president’s bipartisan 2021 infrastructure law, is meant for projects to harden the electrical grid, prevent wildfires, flood-proof communities and stabilize dwindling water supplies, among other efforts. The needs for this kind of spending are likely to be bottomless given the galloping pace of climate change, as seen by the devastation that hurricanes Helene and Milton inflicted in just the past month.
But the progress of launching this work has been slow: Through the end of September, 80 federal programs that received $24.4 billion of the climate resilience money had awarded just $10.3 billion of it, according to POLITICO’s review of spending data provided by agencies.
