Trump Administration Screws Hurricane Helene Victims Again

FEMA is dragging its feet in approving buyouts
for North Carolina homeowners whose property was
wrecked by Hurricane Helene 15 months ago. 

A popular Federal Emergency Management Agency feature is the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program. People whose homes were wrecked in disasters and are at risk of being hit again after repairs can apply for a buyout. 

Qualfied applicants under the voluntary program can get the pre-storm value of their home. Then they can take the money and move somewhere that's less disaster prone. 

The damaged home is torn down, and the site would never be developed again. The community benefits because they won't have to deal with that property in the next disaster, since there would be no house there.  

More than 800 Hurricane Helene victims in western North Carolina applied for buyouts, some of them as long ago as this past February. North Carolina officials, having vetted the applications, sent nearly 600 of those to Washington for processing. More will likely get approved in North Carolina.

But so far, the only thing FEMA has heard in response is crickets. FEMA has not so much as approved one of the buyout applications.  

Reports the Washington Post:

"So far...not a single approval has come through. North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein has called the paralysis 'absolutely unacceptable,' and has pushed for answers. Earlier this month, he wrote to FEMA's acting administrator, detailing the startling number of applications that 'remain without a final decision.'"

By the time the Washington Post published the story more than a week ago, nobody from FEMA responded to requests for comment. 

However, once the story was published, the agency sent a short statement, saying it "remains committed" to North Carolina Helene recovery. The FEMA statement said many applicants had not been approved yet "because they do not comply with federal regulations." 

That's news to William Ray, the director of North Carolina Emergency Management, as NPR reports. "we do not have anything in hand that says that officially things are ineligible. We are not able to get a good answers from FEMA as to why they are not moving forward."

Join the club, William.  

Maybe the problem is Homeland Security Director Kristi "Ice Barbie" Noem, whose department has authority over FEMA.  She has a rule in which she personally approve every expenditure over $100,000.

My accusation is all conjecture and sarcasm on my part, but it wouldn't surprise me if Ice Barbie is gumming up the works with FEMA assistance because she's so busy kicking non-whites out of the country and cosplaying some sort of weird ICE assassin or something.  

 In the best circumstances, these buyouts take awhile to arrange. A 2019 study found that it takes a median of roughly five years to complete a buyout from start to finish. However, FEMA says it usually takes two years to complete. 

However, the Trump administration has deeply cut staffing at FEMA this year, so who's left to manage the buyout process. Plus, the very existence of FEMA is in question, as its future is being debated both Trump Powers That Be. 

Which leads us to another broken Trump promise. He had said that he would "slash through every bureaucratic barrier" and said "every single inch of every property will be fully rebuilt, greater and more beautiful that it was before."

So far. Trump's administration hasn't even been able to tear down damaged properties, never mind build everything back. North Carolina is still a mess, 15 months after the hurricane. 

I'll let WaPol handle this:

"The reality is that local governments continue to wait for large sums in federal reimbursements for debris cleanup and other projects. Roads still need repairs. Renters and homeowners remain displaced."

Click on this link to read the entire, very worthwhile WaPo article. 

     

Trump Denies Disaster Assistance To Blue States, Including Vermont; Send Money To Red States

Damage in Sutton, Vermont after flooding this July. 
President Donald Trump rejected a disaster declaration
for the Northeast Kingdom, likely over politics.

 We've got some more likely evidence that everything Donald Trump does is transactional. And some of the latest news involves us here in Vermont.  

Here's the news, straight from the Associated Press:

"President Donald Trump approved major disaster declarations for Alaska, Nebraska, North Dakota and the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwa late Wednesday, while denying requests from Vermont, Illinois and Maryland and leaving other states still waiting for answers.

The decisions fell mostly along party lines, with Trump touting on social media Wednesday that he had 'won big' in Alaska in the last three presidential elections and that it was his 'honor' to deliver to the 'incredible Patriots' of Missouri, a state he also won three times."

Trump just cannot keep his mouth shut. 

If he hadn't bragged like he always does, he'd have plausible deniability about him picking favorites.  

Trump has approved more disaster declarations than he's thrown away. But he keeps talking about phasing out FEMA, saying he wants states to take the lead in disasters, 

The Vermont piece of this was for July 10 flash flooding in the Northeast Kingdom. State officials waited more than nine weeks for Trump's negative decision. Damages far exceed what some of the affected little towns up there in the NEK can afford, said Eric Forand, the Vermont Emergency Management Director. 

The flood caused more than $1 million just in the town of Sutton, which has a population of only around 200. Across Vermont the July 10 storm caused almost $2 million in damage. The minimum threshold to qualify for federal aid should have been $1.2 million, reports WPTZ.

Vermont Gov. Phil Scott said his administration won't appeal the decision. "When submitting the request we knew that there was a chance it could be denied - and we do not plan to appeal the decision... Moving forward, we'll explore ways to support rural communities with limited resources and what assistance could look like."

Scott is a Republican, but a moderate who, unlike most members of the GOP, has expressed no fealty to Trump and criticizes him at times. Vermont is also known to be among the bluest of blue states. 

In recent public opinion polls, Vermont ranks second behind Hawaii as the least supportive of Trump. Only 24 percent of Vermonters approve of Trump versus 72 percent who oppose him. 

In deciding not to appeal, Scott probably looked at Maryland as an example of what could happen if he did go ahead with asking again. 

Maryland, also a decisively blue state, requested a disaster declaration for two counties in the western part of the state that suffered significant flooding. In July, Maryland requested a disaster declaration, but Trump turned it town. Maryland appealed that decision, because the counties suffered $33.7 million in damage, three times its threshold for federal assistance, reports the AP.

Trump this week turned down that appeal. 

"President Trump and his administration have politicized disaster relief, and our communities are the ones who pay the price," said Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat.

White House officials are trying to portray the denials as heroic efforts to save taxpayers money and mot the partisan attacks that the probably are.

"President Trump provides a more thorough review of disaster declaration requests than any Administration before him," said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson. 

Yeah, right. 

But she went on, saying Trump was "ensuring American tax dollars are uses appropriately and efficiently by the states to supplement - not substitute, their obligation to respond to and recover from disasters."

Sure, because the tiny town of Sutton, Vermont  has a million dollars lying around their town offices to fix the flood damage. 

By the way, I can't begrudge anybody who did receive disaster assistance. They need it. Particularly in western Alaska, which was hit earlier this month by a record strong former typhoon that produced a destructive and deadly storm surge. 

But if you live in a blue state, and you're hit with a hurricane, tornado, wildfire, flood or something dramatic like that, remember that Trump wants you to use those experiences to love him, or else.

Like that's going to happen. 

I'll have a separate piece coming up about how the federal government is shortchanging major disaster zones like western North Carolina, which was devastated by Hurricane Helene last year.  

Trump Administration Wants To Get Rid Of FEMA Aid By October 1. If You Are A Disaster Victim, You're On Your Own.

The Trump administration wants to get rid of the 
Federal Emergency Management Agency, with
no plan to replace it. So I guess disaster victims
will be entirely on their own going forward.

 If a tornado, hurricane, flood, wildfire or some other big disasters destroys your house or business, you're kind of screwed.  

Even more so now that President Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Ice Barbie Kristi Noem and other administration officials are getting more and more hooked on the idea of ending the Federal Emergency Management Agency's role in disaster recovery by October 1. 

Like everything else in the Trump administration, we don't know exactly what that means. I doubt  they do, either. 

The Washington Post suggests that top on the chopping block are efforts to help rebuild after disasters strike, and funding resilience efforts to help communities get ready for the next inevitable calamity. 

I don't know what all this means for the help FEMA provides in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.  

That immediate aid includes helping evacuate people, shelter people who've lost homes, provide food to victims that need it, and other services that come in the hours and days after a tornado destroys a town like Cave City, Arkansas, or a flood roars out of the mountains and trashes a town like Montpelier, Vermont.

Without FEMA, I don't know where the money to help disaster victims will come from.  Per WaPo:

"Without that federal money, government may need to raid their budgets for education, health car and other areas in order to pay for emergency response - and even then might struggle to cope with mounting disasters,'  said (Rep. Jared Moskowitz D-Fla)."

A couple examples of what we might be facing:  

North Carolina is estimated to have suffered just under $60 billion in damage from Hurricane Helene. 

The state's general fund budget for fiscal year 2024 was $29.7 billon. North Carolina has so far allocated $1.3 billion for Helene relief in the state.  Imagine if North Carolina had to foot the entire bill for Helene recovery, which seems to be what at least some people in the Trump administration would have liked.

Another more local example for us Vermonters.  The July, 2023 floods caused more than $600 million in damage across the Green Mountain State. Vermont's 2024 general fund budget was $2.3 billion....

It appears FEMA/Trump want states to pull money out of thin air for disaster relief. As the Washington Post reports: 

"FEMA's acting administrator, Cameron Hamilton, spoke for about 45 minutes on Saturday to a gathering of state emergency managers about the difficulty of change and how stats need to be more resilient and responsible in their disaster response efforts, according to one state-level official who attended.

Hamilton repeatedly used the phrase that states need to work with private partners as the 'performance enhancing drugs of emergency response,' the official said."

It's unclear how the "private partners" would help, and how they might be compelled to help. 

The only thing standing in the way of Trump are laws regarding FEMA, and since he thinks laws are just stupid suggestions, I'm not sure how that will help.  

Per Washington Post:

"'Eliminating FEMA wiki dramatically hurt red states. It will hurt rural areas It will hurt cities. Places will not recover,' Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Florida) said in an interview, adding that FEMA should be reformed but not eliminated,.

REFORM NEEDED

FEMA indeed needs to be reformed. Reform, though, does not mean screwing disaster victims and the states were calamities occur even more

Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vermont) has been pushing for FEMA reform for months if not years. His goal was to make things easier for disaster victims dealing with FEMA. Basically cut through the red tape.  Welch said the plan to get rid of FEMA does exactly the opposite. 

“The Trump Administration’s grand plan for victims of natural disasters is to abandon them—and it’s a complete non-starter," Welch said. 

After the immediate crisis, disaster victims get ensnarled in a bureaucratic mess, and Welch has long railed against what he rightly calls "FEMA's plodding bureaucracy."

Last year, all three members of Vermont's congressional delegation sent a formal letter to then-FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell calling for "long-term and structural reform:" at the agency.

The situation even created some strange Congressional bedfellows. 

Last fall, Welch and Sen Gary Peters (D-MI) joined, of all people Sen. Them Tillis (R-NC) and James Lankford (R-OK) on bipartisan legislation to reform FEMA individual assistance to help people escape FEMA's red tape. 

Tillis and Lankford are pretty MAGA. Welch and Peters are decidedly not MAGA, so this was quite a partnership. 

Had things worked out differently. this rare moment of bipartisanship maybe would have led to real reform.

But of course once Trump was in office, he blew it all up, like he tends to do. 

Here's an allegory of what went on here. 

Not long after I bought my house, I discovered carpenter ants had caused a lot of damage on one corner of the house.    The rest of the house was fine. 

So, we hired experts, who tore out the damaged wood, made sure the carpenter ants were gone, and fixed that corner of the house. I was able to live in the house comfortably while the workers fixed the exterior and living room wall in the southwest corner of the house. Obviously, there was no need to tear down the entire house to start over, right?

The solution Welch, Peters, Tillis and Lankford were working toward was getting rid of the "carpenter ants" in one corner of FEMA.

Trump's solution was to tear down the entire house, i.e. FEMA. 

We just had yet another wide ranging disaster across multiple states. The destruction is immense from tornadoes, flooding and other severe weather stretching from Texas to Ohio. 

Many of these storm victims will need help for months or even years. People whose house floated away or disintegrated in a tornado don't need bureaucracy, which was Senator Welch's point.

 But they also need federal help. Since there doesn't seem to be a plan in place to provide the necessary aid once FEMA evaporates later this year. I guess they're on their own.