You have to wonder how many of these folks who pay $500,000 for lots and build homes--often second homes--worth $1.5 million or more complain about government being too big and having to pay too much in taxes.
Normally, I might agree with those philosophies, but then I never asked or expected the government to come in and pay millions of dollars to protect me from my own folly, while the taxpayers receive little or no benefit from the expenditure.
Rising sea levels are a relatively new news story--I can't remember hearing about it much before 1980 or so.  But beaches have always moved around at the whims of the wind and the tide, and building an expensive structure on a beach was always an exhibition of either folly or the kind of wealth that could absorb any eventual loss.  For that reason, throughout most of the history of this nation, beach houses generally cost no more than people could afford to lose, because anyone with any connection to the coast knew that, in the end, the loss was probably going to occur.
However, somewhere along the way, pork-loving politicians decided that beachfront "replenishment" made their coastal constituents happy, and if that meant that some poor sucker in West Virginia had to pay taxes to preserve a hedge fund manager's private enclave in the Hamptons, or a successful attorney's exclusive neighborhood on Delaware Bay, well, that's just how things work in Washington.
Particularly in this era of depressed personal income and a stressed federal budget, it's time to put a lid on the pork barrel and stop the eternal cycle of erosion, "replenishment" and even worse erosion when the next big nor'easter comes along.  If people make the informed decision of buying real estate on a vulnerable beach, they should be willing to pay the consequences that ensue from that decision.  If they're "not a believer" that sea levels are rising, the Atlantic will probably change their beliefs soon enough.  But it's more than past time to stop throwing public funds down this rathole.
If people really want to "save" their property, let them do what some beachfront homeowners are doing in the Hamptons--form their own taxing district and pay the full cost of any sand replenishment or other similar work  that they want done, and leave the taxpayers that they try so hard to exclude from their neighborhoods off the hook completely.  Or, if that is too much to ask, then require any property owner who benefits from taxpayer-funded replenishment to provide parking spaces along the road and an easement from there to the sea, so that the taxpayers get to enjoy what they paid for.
But in the end, it's better to just admit what King Canute learned so long ago.  You can't hold back the tide.  In the end, one big storm is going to undo millions of dollars of replenishment and armoring, and a rising ocean won't ask for anyone's approval or permission before going exactly where it wills.