The program, established by a 2000 law, provides grants for a variety of disaster mitigation efforts, including levees to protect against floods, safe rooms to provide shelter from tornadoes, vegetation management to reduce damage from fires and seismic retrofitting to fortify buildings for earthquakes.

FEMA announced in April that it was ending the funding to eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse.” The program saved taxpayers more than $150 billion over 20 years, the plaintiffs said.

A group of 20 mostly Democrat-led U.S. states filed a lawsuit on Wednesday seeking to block the administration of President Donald Trump from terminating a multibillion-dollar grant program that funds infrastructure upgrades to protect against natural disasters.