Hurricane Michael has come and gone, but hurricane season in the southeastern U.S. is far from over.
Hurricane Michael was one of the most powerful storms to hit the U.S. in the past half century. It killed at least 30 people, with deaths in Florida, Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina.
It cut off power for over a million people, and as of Friday, 124,000 were still waiting for that power to be restored.
As with any natural disaster, the president will be judged on the merits of the federal government’s response.
Natural disaster response has conventionally been seen as a nonpartisan issue in the U.S., but it’s growing more contentious in the Trump era. The government needs to make disaster relief a priority.
President Trump was rightly criticized for his administration’s underwhelming and at times tone-deaf response to Hurricane Maria, which ravaged the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico in September 2017.
Last month, when the Puerto Rican government updated the death toll for Hurricane Maria to almost 3,000, Trump rejected the new figure, without evidence, and called his administration’s response to the storm an “incredible, unsung success.”
In light of the federal government’s poor performance in Puerto Rico, there are serious questions to be raised about the federal government’s level of preparedness for this year’s hurricane season.
In September, news broke that the Trump administration diverted $9.8 million in funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
It’s hard to see the rationale for this budget reallocation. This decision was made after one of the worst hurricane seasons in U.S. history, when a deadly trifecta of hurricanes – Harvey, Irma and Maria — wrought enormous damage on multiple states and territories. The 2017 hurricane season was the most expensive in U.S. history, causing well over $200 billion in damage.
Why would that be a good time to take money away from FEMA, the agency responsible for saving lives in the midst of natural disasters? If anything, FEMA should have received a budget increase after what occurred last year.
This budget reallocation was able to happen without the oversight of Congress and without the knowledge of the American people because both FEMA and ICE are under the Department of Homeland Security, which can move funds from one of its sub-agencies to another. We only know about it because Sen. Jeff Merkely, D–Oregon, made public the DHS memo ordering the reallocation.
The fact that ICE was the recipient of the funds only makes the decision look worse, due to ICE’s association with mass detention and family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border. On the DHS memo, the $9.8 million diverted from FEMA to ICE was specifically earmarked for “Detention Beds” and the “Transportation and Removal Program.”
So the Trump administration diverted almost $10 billion from one of the federal government’s least controversial programs — disaster relief — to one of its most controversial programs. That funding change indicates where this administration’s priorities lie.
There is a scientific consensus that climate change is increasing the likelihood and severity of hurricanes and other tropical storms. If the U.S. government took scientists seriously, it would increase funding for disaster relief.
FEMA’s spending spiked dramatically in 2005 and 2006, after Hurricane Katrina. It is reasonable to expect that FEMA will need to increase its spending this year.
FEMA’s work evacuating people and rescuing those in danger is life-saving, and with the right budget, the agency could be doing more. The biggest reason why some people don’t follow evacuation orders is that they can’t afford to leave the area. The federal government should provide evacuation services for those who need them.
The Trump administration should be putting more and more effort into disaster preparedness, but the president’s actions show no signs of that happening.
