(AP) — The Federal Emergency Management Agency on Wednesday opened applications for a major resilience grant program that the agency canceled last year, less than three weeks after a federal judge ordered FEMA to make the funding available.

FEMA will make $1 billion available for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which helps states, local governments, territories and tribes take on preparedness projects to harden against natural hazards like fires, floods, earthquakes and hurricanes.

“When done correctly, mitigation activities save lives and reduce the cost of future disasters,” Karen S. Evans, FEMA’s acting leader, said in a statement announcing the resumption.

The funding announcement comes after FEMA under a previous acting leader, Cameron Hamilton, canceled the BRIC program last April, calling it “wasteful and ineffective.” That decision drew blowback from Republican and Democratic lawmakers as roughly $3.6 billion was halted for what amounted to several years’ worth of projects to protect infrastructure, communities and homes across the U.S.

The Trump administration has slashed disaster preparedness dollars across multiple FEMA programs. It’s been one year since President Donald Trump approved any state or tribe’s request for hazard mitigation funding, a typical add on to major disaster declarations.

Now, FEMA’s notice announcing the grant opportunity could signal the administration is embracing aspects of mitigation to safeguard against disasters, stating “BRIC aims to shift the focus of federal investments away from reactive post-disaster spending towards proactive infrastructure-focused hazard mitigation.”

A federal judge last December ruled that FEMA could not eliminate BRIC and ordered the agency to reverse course after a coalition of 22 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration over the cancellation. U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns again ordered FEMA this month to take more steps toward restoring the program.

Last week, FEMA announced it would resume program support for BRIC awards when the DHS shutdown ended, saying that it had finished evaluating the program that Trump signed into law during his first term. Under former President Joe Biden, BRIC became too bureaucratic and “focused on ‘climate change’ initiatives,” FEMA said in a statement.