Officials hope Congress does not repeat disaster aid battle that followed Superstorm Sandy
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Floodwaters continue to rise across the Houston area and people struggled to get out as Harvey kept dumping rain. (Aug. 28)
AP
WASHINGTON — Officials eager to help Texas recover from Hurricane Harvey hope to avoid the political squall over disaster aid that followed Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the last major storm that pummeled the U.S.
Lawmakers from New York and New Jersey took to Twitter to make clear they were ready to support disaster aid for the battered Gulf Coast, even though many of their colleagues from that region opposed the aid package approved after Sandy struck the Northeast nearly five years ago.
Ted Cruz Texas cohorts voted vs NY/NJ aid after Sandy but I’ll vote 4 Harvey aid. NY wont abandon Texas. 1 bad turn doesnt deserve another
— Rep. Pete King (@RepPeteKing) August 27, 2017
President Trump said Monday he has already spoken to congressional leaders and he expects relief to come “very, very quickly.”
But even as Houston tries to clear its flooded streets and shovel out the muck from Harvey, some conservatives are warning Congress not to fill a relief bill with pork-barrel spending.
“I have never been opposed to relief bills that truly meet an emergency need. As we look at helping our neighbors in Texas, our hearts can’t avoid being touched by the devastation we see,” said Rep. Mark Meadows, the North Carolina Republican who chairs the arch-conservative Freedom Caucus.
“Sadly and far too often, relief packages become a vehicle for all kinds of special interest and pet projects that have nothing to do with the devastation,” Meadows said. “Narrowly focused relief packages would get conservative support and would only lose that support if the legislation strays from its core mission.”
Relief from Sandy came before Congress during the lame-duck session after the 2012 election. To attract votes from some reluctant senators for what was considered a must-pass bill, congressional leaders added provisions that were unrelated to that storm. The maneuver angered fiscal conservatives.
The House later broke the Sandy bill into separate pieces and removed many unrelated sections the Senate had sought. After the House rejected a proposal to require disaster funding to be offset by cuts elsewhere in the budget, many Republicans voted against the package. The Sandy aid bill ultimately passed the House only because of overwhelming Democratic support.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency projects the amount available for disaster relief will be about $1.5 billion by Sept 30, considerably less than what Harvey is expected to need once costs are tallied in Texas and neighboring Louisiana.
“FEMA, right now, we have the money necessary for Texas and Louisiana if we need,” Trump said at a White House news conference. “But the real number, which will be many billions of dollars, will go through Congress. I think it’ll happen very quickly, it’ll go very fast.”
Hurricane Ike, which struck the Texas’ Gulf Coast in 2008 but resulted in far less flooding than Harvey, ended up costing $4.5 billion in disaster relief funds.
“We’re going to be here for several years,” FEMA Administrator Brock Long said Monday during a news conference in Corpus Christi with Gov. Greg Abbott and other Texas officials.
Forecast: Where is Harvey now; where will it go next?
Hurricane impact: Harvey will drive 30,000 to shelters in Texas, FEMA says
Background: $51 billion in Sandy aid — who voted ‘no’ and why
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican who railed against his party’s leaders when Sandy aid was held up in 2012, on Monday criticized those from Texas who opposed it.
“The Congressional members in Texas are hypocrites and I said back in 2012 they’d be proven to be hypocrites,” Christie told reporters at a school opening in Newark. “When you’re a state that has any kind of coastal exposure like Texas does to the Gulf, you’re going to wind up having some type of disaster.”Â
Disaster aid may not be the only issue looming in Congress given Harvey’s massive flooding.
Harvey is expected to inundate the National Flood Insurance Program, which still has about $25 billion in debt from paying claims to victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Superstorm Sandy in 2012, and severe floods in Louisiana last year.
A post-Katrina law gave the program authority to borrow up to $20 billion, and that was increased by another $10 billion after Sandy. But Congress would have to increase that line of credit with the federal treasury if damage from Harvey is as bad as expected, several experts said.
“It may be a matter of semantics, but I don’t consider that disaster aid. The government is running an insurance company, and the insurance company owes money to policyholders who paid their premiums,†said R.L. Lehmann, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, a free-market think tank.
“This is not discretionary: You have to pay claims to people who have a contract,†Lehmann said.
FEMA insures about 5 million properties nationally, including 585,000 in Texas, about half of which are in the counties that include Houston and Galveston. Most of that FEMA-backed coverage is provided through commercial insurance companies that sell and service policies.
“If damage is similar to Sandy, and that doesn’t seem like an unreasonable assumption, then it could be in the $8 billion to $10 billion range,†said Lehmann. “Some guesses are that it could be more than Katrina, or $15 billion to $16 billion.â€
Contributing: Eliza Collins
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