On the heels of torrential flooding, City Limits caught up with Sunset Park community leader, Elizabeth Yeampierre, to talk about federal cuts to natural disaster protections and how communities can come together to survive extreme weather.

BROOKLYN, N.Y. — Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of UPROSE, a grassroots organization promoting climate justice in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Wednesday, July 23, 2025.

As New York City grapples with extreme weather like last week’s torrential rains, which halted traffic and flooded the subway system, a Trump administration decision from earlier this spring to cut federal funding for natural disaster protection hits hard.

But Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of the grassroots environmental organization UPROSE, says the way forward is to create a neighborhood plan to face severe weather events that grow stronger as climate change worsens. 

“People are starting to realize that the solutions are hyper-local and that their relationships with each other are going to be central to us being able to survive the next big storm,” Yeampierre said.

In Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, her organization has been training people to take on green jobs, hosting workshops on how to prune trees and build community gardens that collect stormwater before it floods the streets. 

And they host community-led conversations on how neighborhoods can respond to severe weather. That could include building an inventory of residents that have emergency preparedness skills, from nurses who could care for the injured to leaders who could act as first responders or construction workers who could help rebuild.

This approach, Yeampierre says, protects communities at a time when they can’t count on the federal government to protect them from flash floods and storms.

In April the Trump administration decided to shut down a program run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that supports  critical infrastructure across the country, protecting communities from disasters before they happen.

New York’s Attorney General joined a coalition of 19 states last week in suing the Trump administration for shutting down the program.

Known as the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, the initiative gave nearly 2,000 projects $4.5 billion over the past four years to safeguard cities from climate catastrophes, according to the New York Attorney General.

Given that coastal communities face the biggest threats from flooding, New York is among the states that received the most money from the program, totalling over $380 million for 38 BRIC projects.

That included, for instance, a $50 million grant for the Central Harlem Cloudburst Flood Mitigation Project, which paid for flood prevention measures to protect over 45,000 city residents from flash flooding of the Harlem River.

But the Trump administration questions the importance of the initiative.

“The BRIC program was yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program,” FEMA reportedly said in a news release at the time, which has since been taken down from the agency’s website.

FEMA “should be terminated” as the agency “has been slow and totally ineffective,” President Donald Trump said on Truth Social.

Among the defunded BRIC projects was a $50 million grant for flood protections along the Harlem River. (Photo by Adi Talwar)

“Individual states should handle storms etc as they come. Big savings, far more efficient,” he added on the social media platform.

But Yeampierre says FEMA provides food, health care, and shelter when disaster strikes, and that undermining it will hurt communities across the city. 

An activist and co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance—a national non-profit that also suffered federal funding cuts—Yeampierre spoke with City Limits about the slashes to FEMA and how a neighborhood approach to the climate crisis could save lives.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Tell us about the work that you do and why it’s important to your community?

UPROSE was founded in 1966, it’s the oldest Latino community based organization in Brooklyn. Next year it turns 60. And next year I will have been here 30 years, so I’ve seen a lot.

Basically our organization listens to the community and follows the community’s charge. So when it comes to climate we are doing environmental justice work because that’s what the community said was important.

It did take a while to get the community involved because not everyone saw how climate change was affecting them back in the early 2000s. 

But then there was a tornado that hit this part of Brooklyn [in 2007] and after that people started showing up. We started having sinkholes in Sunset Park and then Superstorm Sandy happened. 

Sandy became sort of like the marker, where all of a sudden the base of people interested in environmental issues in Sunset Park started growing. Old oak trees were uprooted and fell all over the place. Being in the park was dangerous because anything could fall and kill you.

But Sunset Park was not impacted the way that Red Hook was, which is our sister community, we found them under seven feet of water. So people here set themselves up to help Red Hook, to help the Rockaways, so it kind of became this place where people were dispatched to go to different places to help them.

What was that community effort like?

[Right after Sandy happened] we called for a meeting and it was packed. Everybody came, and I remember because it was a storefront that we had before we moved into our current office, and there were just so many people. And all we did was ask: what do you want us to do, what should it look like, and what are your ideas? 

And the ideas were mind-blowing. 

One was a block-to-block organizing effort where we could identify one person per block who could act as a first responder. In everybody’s block there is always a lady at her window, who knows which of her neighbors is on dialysis, who knows everybody’s business, who is hooking up with who. And that’s your first responder, that’s your organizer. And so we started organizing block by block and identifying projects that they would want to do together on each block to prevent flooding in the future. 

We identified places where people could grow gardens behind their houses to soak up the water when it rained and then share food. We did workshops on how to build a stormwater barrel and what it cost and where they could get the supplies, and our young people made a video about that.

So we started identifying interventions that were accessible and affordable to people. Because the other thing that we heard from the community is that addressing climate change was expensive, and only the gentrifiers could afford these things and that they couldn’t. And so little by little, we basically started educating the community about all the different kinds of things that they could do together. 

How does losing FEMA funding impact the community in times of crisis?

First let me begin by saying that I don’t want to romanticize FEMA. It needs to be reformed because it doesn’t serve our communities in the best way. The resources have been allocated in a discriminatory way. We have seen climate disasters where communities of color died in the thousands, but white communities got so much more money [from FEMA] even though they lost fewer lives. 

Flood damage in Woodside, Queens, following Hurricane Ida in 2021. (Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)

But FEMA funds do make it possible for people to get up from under the rubble, gather their lives and recover from serious life-threaning events. When you think about the need for FEMA, think about tornadoes. Think of a Category 5 hurricane, think of an event that is massive in size and leaves places looking like a war zone, right? 

So FEMA is supposed to make it possible for people to get health care and a place to live. 

And so basically, what the federal administration is saying by defending that it should be terminated is that at the hardest moment in a family’s life, in a person’s life, when they need the federal government to show up the most so that they can survive, that they are not going to be there for them. That’s what they’re telling them, and that’s not an exaggeration. 

They’re basically telling them that you’re on your own. 

So I think that message to our communities has to come through: we are on our own. And what do we do when the government fails us, when it’s not available? What do we do for each other? We build community.

We work to complement each other and work in a way that is deeply collaborative and complementary.

What are some examples of what can be done?

We’ve been meeting with churches and people from our own base and teachers that are really pretty freaking badass and we are forming a collective of people from the neighborhood to build our own sustainable community. Saturday we had a workshop that was packed with everybody who came to learn to get their certificate on tree pruning, because that’s a green job. 

During the winter we have these learning circles in the basement of a local church where we talked about what do you do if there’s an extreme weather event, what can we do on the block? The questions were really open to get the neighborhood and the people to really think critically about what they could do.

One woman said, well we can find out who in our building knows how to do first aid and who is a nurse? Who knows how to do construction and who knows how to fix things, who knows how to grow things? And then somebody can check in on the elders, and we can find out what medication they take? What do they need? We can make a list. We can create a list in our building and then on our block. We can create an inventory. 

And they went on and on. Once they were asked, they were already thinking about how we take care of each other. So that is the conversation that’s been happening in a real granular way. 

People are starting to realize that the solutions are hyper local and that their relationships with each other are going to be central to us being able to survive the next big storm. 

You have to invest in communities. Communities have the solutions. They have the answers and you have to trust that they know how to do it. 

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Mariana@citylimits.org. To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

Want to republish this story? Find City Limits’ reprint policy here.

The post ‘Solutions are Hyper-Local’: Brooklyn Climate Organizer On Facing the Next Big Storm As Feds Pull Support appeared first on City Limits.

By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER and JOSH BOAK, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump may have found a way to achieve his goal of removing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell: by accusing him of mismanaging the U.S. central bank’s $2.5 billion building renovation project.

The push comes after a monthslong campaign by Trump to try to rid himself of the politically independent central banker, who has resisted the Republican president’s calls to slash interest rates out of concerns about the administration’s tariffs sparking higher levels of inflation.

The Supreme Court recently signaled that Trump can’t fire Powell simply because the president disagrees with him on interest rates. But legally he could do so “for cause,” such as misconduct or dereliction of duty.

Trump has seized on that provision, indicating that Powell’s handling of an extensive renovation project on two Fed buildings in Washington could be grounds to take the unprecedented and possibly legally dubious step of firing him.

The project has been underway for years, going back to Trump’s first term. But it only recently caught the White House’s attention.

Last week, when asked if he thought the building renovation was a “firing offense,” Trump said, “I think it is.” But he later added that it was “highly unlikely” that he would ultimately remove Powell before his term expires in May 2026.

The risk of the Fed losing its political independence could undermine America’s financial markets, possibly leading to a meltdown in stocks and investors charging a premium to lend to the U.S. economy.

Here’s what to know:

Ousting Powell risks setting off market panic

The Fed chair has been an obstacle in Trump’s efforts to gain total control over the executive branch.

Powell and his board have the dual mandate of maximizing employment and keeping prices stable, a task that can require them to make politically unpopular moves such as raising interest rates to hold inflation in check. The general theory is that keeping the Fed free from the influence of the White House — other than for nominations of Fed officials — allows it to fulfill its mission based on what the economy needs, instead of what a politician wants.

An attempt to remove Powell from his job before his term ends would undercut the Fed’s long-standing independence from day-to-day politics and could lead to higher inflation, higher interest rates and a weaker economy.

FILE – Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell arrives before a Senate Committee on Banking hearing, June 25, 2025, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)

The Fed’s main headquarters is over 90 years old

The Fed says its main headquarters, known as the Marriner S. Eccles building, was in dire need of an upgrade because its electrical, plumbing and HVAC systems, among others, are nearly obsolete and some date back to the building’s construction in the 1930s.

The renovation will also remove asbestos, lead and other hazardous elements and update the building with modern electrical and communications systems. The H-shaped building, named after a former Fed chair in the 1930s and ’40s, is located near some of Washington’s highest-profile monuments and has references to classical architecture and marble in the facades and stonework. The central bank is also renovating a building next door that it acquired in 2018.

The Fed says there has been periodic maintenance to the structures but adds this is the first “comprehensive renovation.”

The renovation costs have ballooned over the years

Trump administration officials have criticized the Fed over the project’s expense, which has reached $2.5 billion, about $600 million more than was originally budgeted.

Like a beleaguered homeowner facing spiraling costs for a remodeling project, the Fed cites many reasons for the greater expense. Construction costs, including for materials and labor, rose sharply during the inflation spike in 2021 and 2022. More asbestos needed to be removed than expected. Washington’s local restrictions on building heights forced it to build underground, which is pricier.

In 2024, the Fed’s board canceled its planned renovations of a third building because of rising costs.

The Fed says the renovations will reduce costs “over time” because it will be able to consolidate its roughly 3,000 Washington-based employees into fewer buildings and will no longer need to rent as much extra space as it does now.

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White House budget director calls renovations ‘ostentatious’

Russ Vought, the administration’s top budget adviser, wrote Powell a letter that said Trump is “extremely troubled” about the Fed’s “ostentatious overhaul” of its facilities.

The Fed’s renovation plans call for “rooftop terrace gardens, VIP private dining rooms and elevators, water features, premium marble, and much more,” Vought said in last week’s letter.

Powell has disputed the claims, which were given wide circulation in a paper issued by the Mercatus Center, a think tank at George Mason University, in March 2025. The paper was written by Andrew Levin, an economist at Dartmouth College and former Fed staffer.

“There’s no VIP dining room,” Powell said last month during a Senate Banking Committee hearing. “There’s no new marble. … There are no special elevators. There are no new water features. … And there’s no roof terrace gardens.”

Some of those elements were removed from initial building plans submitted in 2021, the Fed says.

White House also takes issue with the Fed reducing its renovation costs

The Fed’s changes to its building plans have opened it up to another line of attack: White House officials suggest the Fed violated the terms of the approval it received from a local planning commission by changing its plans.

In its September 2021 approval of the project, the National Capital Planning Commission said it “Commends” the Fed for “fully engaging partner federal agencies.” But because the Fed changed its plans, the administration is indicating it needed to go back to the commission for a separate approval.

Essentially, White House officials are saying Powell is being reckless with taxpayer money because of the cost of the renovation, but they are also accusing him of acting unethically by scaling back the project to save money.

James Blair, the White House deputy chief of staff whom Trump named to the commission, said in a post on X that Powell’s June congressional testimony “leads me to conclude the project is not in alignment with plans submitted to & approved by the National Capital Planning Commission in 2021.”

Blair said he intends to review materials from the Fed on how the approved 2021 renovation plans have changed and circulate a letter among his colleagues on the commission that would go to Fed officials.

The Fed has asked for an independent review of the project

The central bank says, in a series of frequently asked questions on its website, that it is “not subject to the direction” of the commission and has only complied with its directives voluntarily.

Instead, the Fed said it is accountable to the Senate and the House of Representatives and is overseen by an independent inspector general, not the White House. Powell has asked the inspector general to review the costs of the renovation project.

By SUDHIN THANAWALA and GARY FIELDS, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A migrant from Venezuela deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador has taken the first step toward suing the U.S. government, saying he was wrongly sent to a notorious prison in the Central American country where he was beaten by guards and kept from contacting his family or an attorney.

Neiyerver Adrián Leon Rengel, 27, has filed a claim for $1.3 million with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, his attorneys with Democracy Defenders Fund said Thursday. Rengel is among more than 250 migrants from Venezuela sent to El Salvador in March, out of the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, after President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 against members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

Immigration agents took Rengel into custody on March 13 in the parking lot of his apartment in Irving, Texas, wrongly claiming his tattoos reflected an affiliation with Tren de Aragua, according to his claim. He had entered the U.S. in 2023. He worked as a barber and was scheduled to appear before an immigration judge in 2028.

Homeland Security said in an email that Rengel was a “confirmed associate” of the Tren de Aragua gang — though it did not specify how it reached that conclusion — who had entered the country illegally. It called his claims a fake “sob story.”

“President Trump and Secretary Noem will not allow foreign terrorist enemies to operate in our country and endanger Americans,” the email said. It added, “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”

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At El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, Rengel said guards hit him with fists and batons and, on one occasion, viciously beat him after taking him to an area of the prison without cameras.

Rengel was sent to Venezuela earlier this month as part of a prisoner exchange deal. His attorneys say he is living with his mother and is “terrified” to return to the United States.

They are seeking compensation for emotional and psychological injuries.

A federal judge ruled in June that the Trump administration must give some of the migrants sent to the prison in El Salvador a chance to challenge their deportations.

U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg said the people hadn’t been able to formally contest the removals or allegations that they were members of Tren de Aragua. He ordered the administration to work toward giving them a way to file those challenges.

The judge wrote that “significant evidence” had surfaced indicating that many of the migrants were not connected to the gang “and thus were languishing in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations.”

At a hearing on Thursday, an attorney for the Trump administration told Boasberg it would not immediately bring the migrants sent from El Salvador to Venezuela as part of the prisoner exchange back to the U.S.

Trump officials planned to await the outcome of other court cases before deciding whether to allow the migrants to return, U.S. Department of Justice attorney Tiberius Davis said.

Boasberg had ordered the administration to turn planes carrying the accused gang members around, but the demand was ignored. Rengel’s attorneys say he was on one of those planes.

The judge has found probable cause that the administration committed contempt of court.

Boasberg said Thursday he planned to expand his contempt probe to include a recent whistleblower complaint that claims a top Justice Department official suggested the Trump administration might have to ignore court orders as it prepared to deport Venezuelan migrants it accused of being gang members.

Thanawala reported from Atlanta.

By WILL WEISSERT, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order mandating that federal authorities clarify whether college athletes can be considered employees of the schools they play for — attempting to create clearer national standards for the NCAA’s name image and likeness program.

The move comes amid a dramatic increase in the money flowing into and around college athletics. It also follows key court victories won by current and former athletes angry that they were barred for decades, both from earning income based on their celebrity and from sharing in the billions of revenue they helped generate.

Facing a growing number of state laws undercutting its authority, the NCAA in July 2021 cleared the way for athletes to cash in with name, image and likeness deals with brands and sponsors.

That came mere days after a 9-0 decision from the Supreme Court that found the NCAA cannot impose caps on education-related benefits schools provide to their athletes because such limits violate antitrust law.

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Trump’s action directs the secretary of labor and the National Labor Relations Board to clarify the status of collegiate athletes through guidance or rules “that will maximize the educational benefits and opportunities provided by higher education institutions through athletics.”

The NCAA’s embrace of NIL deals set the stage for another massive change that took effect July 1: The ability of schools to begin paying millions of dollars to their own athletes, up to $20.5 million per school over the next year. The $2.8 billion House settlement shifts even more power to college athletes, who have also won the ability to transfer from school to school without waiting to play.

The NCAA has been lobbying for several years for limited antitrust protection to keep some kind of control over this new landscape — and avoid more crippling lawsuits — but a handful of bills have gone nowhere in Congress.

The 1,100 universities that comprise the NCAA have insisted for decades that athletes are students who cannot be considered anything like a school employee.

This stance has long been a part of the amateur model at the heart of college athletics, but that model is rapidly being replaced by a more professional structure fed by money that is coming from donors, brands and now the schools themselves.

Some coaches have even suggested collective bargaining is a potential solution to the chaos they see.

It is a complicated topic: Universities would become responsible for paying wages, benefits, and workers’ compensation and schools and conferences have insisted they will fight any such move in court (some already have).

While private institutions fall under the National Labor Relations Board, public universities must follow labor laws that vary from state to state and it’s worth noting that virtually every state in the South has “right to work” laws that present challenges for unions.