Prepared to act

Congress is ‘prepared to act’ on disaster aid as FEMA runs out of cash, Cole says

Disaster relief funding is expected to be depleted this summer, but the White House hasn’t sent Congress an emergency request.

Jennifer Scholtes

The Trump administration is on track to run out of cash for disaster relief this summer, and the House’s top appropriator has been asking for an emergency request from the White House.

FEMA estimates that it will be down to about $5 billion in the disaster relief fund in June — just in time for the start of Atlantic hurricane season — before running out of cash by July or August. By the time the new fiscal year dawns in October, the Trump administration predicts it will have $8 billion in disaster costs it cannot pay, unless Congress clears an emergency aid package in the meantime.

But lawmakers need President Donald Trump to send a formal request to make that happen.

“I have raised this several times,” House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said in a brief interview. “Look, we’re prepared to act on that. We never act until we get a request. So that’s really up to them.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is scheduled to testify before appropriators in both chambers this week and is expected to field questions about the administration’s plans for disaster aid. The secretary plans to tell lawmakers that the federal government’s role in emergency management “needs to be both reformed and reimagined.”

Noem has privately told administration officials that she wants to eliminate FEMA’s role in funding long-term rebuilding efforts and halt multibillion-dollar grant programs that help communities prepare for disasters, six people told POLITICO’s E&E News earlier this year.

For months, lawmakers in both parties have talked about the possibility of tying disaster aid to action on the debt limit. If Republicans can’t pass their party-line megabill by the time the U.S. runs out of borrowing power in the coming months, they will be forced to table their plan to raise the debt ceiling by $5 trillion under that bill and instead embrace a bipartisan solution that at least delays the fiscal cliff for a few months.

The White House has yet to send Congress a specific request for helping California recover from the series of wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles and surrounding areas in January. But FEMA has allocated more than $2.7 billion to aid recovery from those fires.