As Florida faces Hurricane Milton, believed to be shaping up as the storm of the century, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas doubled down on his claim that FEMA is out of money.
“We are expecting another hurricane hitting. We do not have the funds. FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season and what is imminent,” Mayorkas said on October 2.
But the Inspector General for Homeland Security begs to differ. In August, it released a surprising report claiming FEMA has at least $8.3 billion in unused and unspent funds. The report says that as of October 2022, FEMA still had around $73 billion left unspent across 847 open disaster declarations. The report also mentioned that $8.3 billion in unspent funds was for disasters declared in 2012 or earlier.
However, analysts say that FEMA can’t use the unspent money from past disasters, so it remains stuck in semantics. At the same time, 600 people are still reported missing from Hurricane Helene, at least 220 people have died, and entire towns were destroyed.
Experts say that those extra funds have been sitting in a slush fund to be used by the Biden-Harris administration for whatever it sees fit.
Jeremy Portnoy from the watchdog group Open the Books explains that FEMA has organized its funding so that grant money is locked in for specific time periods. This means the agency must use the money during or before a “period of performance” deadline, making the funds unavailable for any other use outside that timeframe.
The Inspector General’s report found that FEMA has been extending deadlines for $7 billion in grants by as much as 16 years, sometimes without any reason. For example, FEMA still has $4.5 billion in unused funds from Superstorm Sandy, which occurred 12 years ago in 2012. FEMA officials refuse to explain why they have frozen the funds for so long.
The report also mentions that FEMA officials use “subjective” criteria to decide how long to extend spending programs, which increases the risk of fraud, waste, and abuse the longer a program stays open.
Congressional Republicans are criticizing the Biden-Harris administration’s response to Hurricane Helene. FEMA is facing backlash for spending $1.1 billion to shelter and assist illegal immigrants, according to government documents. Representative Nancy Mace from South Carolina has introduced a bill to end FEMA’s shelter program for illegal migrants.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) provided $640.9 million this year in funds managed by FEMA to help state and local governments handle the increase of asylum seekers. However, Mayorkas’ office responded late Thursday, stating that this money cannot be used for hurricane relief because Congress specifically allocated it for the migrant crisis. Over the past two years, more than $1.4 billion has been committed from FEMA programs to support organizations caring for migrants.
Last year, DHS allocated $780 million for the migrant crisis, initially through the FEMA Emergency Food and Shelter Program, which funds relief efforts that are not related to natural disasters. Later, they used the new FEMA Shelter and Services Program, which Congress approved in late 2022, to address the migrant crisis. The $640.9 million spent this year comes entirely from the Shelter and Services Program.
But even if that is true, it is not what the program was intended for. The original program that provided funds for migrants was created to help reduce homelessness. A 1983 law set up the Emergency Food and Shelter Program to support “projects and activities” in areas with high unemployment or poverty.
However, the funding bill from December 2022 authorized a new program for spending on migrants, describing its purpose as providing “shelter and other services” for people encountered by the Department of Homeland Security.
Since Hurricane Helene hit the Southeast, causing severe flooding from Florida to North Carolina and killing at least 202 people, about $4 million has been directly given to affected families and individuals, boasted White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Thursday.
The stories vary widely, and the mainstream media seeks to hide the truth, whatever that truth might be. However, one thing is clear: Congress could pass emergency legislation to rewrite the rules and release billions of dollars from a gridlocked FEMA.
However, chaos via voter suppression is Harris’s only remaining path to victory. The Biden administration will burn that money before they see it go to the largely conservative counties in hurricane-devasted swing states.