This year’s hurricane season is on track to rival some of the worst the country has ever seen. Hurricane Helene killed at least 223 people in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee after it made landfall as a Category 4 Hurricane on Sept. 27 and destroyed property as far inland as the mountains of Appalachia. As of Wednesday morning, Floridians who hadn’t already evacuated were hunkering down for Hurricane Milton, expected late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning as the second major storm to make landfall in two weeks.
As cleanup from Hurricane Helene continues and Florida braces itself for Hurricane Milton, former President Donald Trump and other Republicans have irresponsibly chosen to spread lies about the Federal Emergency Management Agency, one of the most visible facets of the federal government. While FEMA has been rightly criticized for years as ineffective, slow and overly bureaucratic, the lies that the Republicans are pushing are different.
While FEMA has been rightly criticized for years as ineffective, slow and overly bureaucratic, the lies that the Republicans are pushing are different.
Among the many lies that are being told: that FEMA will run out of money before the end of the year because it gave that money to migrants; that the Biden administration is only giving out a few hundred dollars in aid to people in total; that aid in North Carolina is being denied so the federal government can steal that land for mining lithium. There are twisted facts undergirding some of those myths, but none are intended to increase assistance to the people affected. Instead, the only aim has been to sow distrust among people trying to rebuild their lives, potentially disrupting the flow of information about which areas need help the most.
Much of FEMA’s work is paid out of its Disaster Relief Fund. Unlike most other federal funding schemes, the fund is designed to be topped off both as part of the annual budgeting process and through supplemental funding. That money never expires, which allows FEMA to draw from it continuously. The agency’s baseline funding has been increasing over the last decade or so, with a massive spike to cover years when, say, a string of hurricanes hit, or a global pandemic leaves many Americans needing help to pay for funerals.
As the Congressional Budget Office put it in 2022, FEMA’s spending “has been driven less by the number of disasters declared and more by the size and severity of individual disasters.” Look no further for proof of that than 500-mile path of destruction Helene left in the U.S. Emergency workers worry that the debris from Helene, much of which hasn’t been picked up yet, will be swept up in Milton’s intense winds and turned into missiles that cause even more damage.
So even as FEMA’s resources have increased, they’ve also been stretched thin as catastrophic events pile up. In addition to hurricanes, the agency aims to help make communities whole after crises ranging from raging forest fires in California to last year’s massive flooding in Vermont. Unfortunately, the agency’s handling of those Vermont floods left survivors frustrated and without critical resources.
“One of the things that I learned early on in the flood was that anybody that you talked to had one tiny piece of the pie and you needed to talk to at least 12 more people about the exact same thing,” Anne Ward, executive director of a local nonprofit, told Vermont Public this summer. “And you would get different answers depending on who you talked to.”
The good news is that FEMA put new rules in place this year to lower the hurdles for receiving disaster relief. That includes immediate cash for individuals’ emergency expenses and making it easier to help people whose insurance doesn’t fully cover their losses. As such, the Biden administration has getting aid to Helene survivors more quickly than past policies would have allowed.
The good news is that FEMA put new rules into place this year to lower the hurdles for receiving disaster relief.
But, again, you wouldn’t know it from the lies being told by Trump and other right-wing agitators. It’s bad enough that the amount of disinformation that’s poisoning the information ecosystem has forced FEMA to correct the record on its website, but it’s especially galling when you factor in the hypocrisy of the people spreading the disinformation. Then-President Trump reportedly considered withholding disaster aid from California until he was shown charts mapping how many of his supporters in Orange County were affected by the wildfires. Meanwhile, just ahead of Helene hitting Florida, congressional Republicans skipped out on the usual front-loading of FEMA’s disaster budget when passing a stopgap spending bill.
The stream of misinformation and scorn from the right is making an already difficult job even harder. Having to deal with hurricane-related flooding hundreds of miles inland will only stretch FEMA’s resources even further. And climate change will only continue to breed storms like Milton, which owes much of its nightmarish rapid intensification to the warming waters in the Gulf.
When it’s finally completed its mission, FEMA will have spent billions upon billions of dollars to help clean up after Helene and Milton and to help individuals and governments hit by those storms to recover. There will be legitimate criticisms to be made, but what Trump and many Republicans are doing is cruelly multiplying suffering on the ground in hopes of channeling that pain into political advantage.