Trump Scales Back Emergency Funds as Hurricane Season Starts
BY PHILIP ELLIOTT Senior Correspondent, TIME
Two weeks before Election Day last year, Donald Trump dropped into western North Carolina, where the devastation from Tropical Storm Helene was still fresh and frustration with Washington was boiling over. If elected, Trump pledged, he would do better in future crises, learning the lessons of the destruction the hurricane had unleashed there on Sept. 27.
"The power of nature, nothing you can do about it. But you got to get a little bit better crew in to do a better job than has been done by the White House, because it's not good, not good," Trump said during a two-day trip to a state that weeks later would vote for Trump as president for the third time in as many elections.
Now back in power, however, his Administration is not exactly championing the rebuild of that part of Appalachia, where 95 people died and about 185,000 homes were damaged or destroyed in North Carolina alone. In fact, he's scaling back federal help available for that region and telling the states to take bigger pieces of the financial burden for future storms, just as hurricane season gets underway.
Given the chance to take extraordinary steps to continue full government funding, Trump is declining, breaking with how his predecessors handled major crises. In North Carolina alone, the price tag to recover from Helene is expected to be around $60 billion; Gov. Josh Stein's budget proposal in March called for total state spending on all programs to be almost $34 billion, meaning folks expected Washington to carry much of the recovery.
But Trump wants to shift the burden back to Governors. The shortfall is especially worrying as hurricane season starts this weekend with most experts—including those inside the Federal Emergency Management Agency—warning that the feds are nowhere close to being ready. It looks like there will be about $8 billion in disaster costs that are not funded by the time the new federal budget starts in October, and the White House seems fine letting that check fall beyond the Beltway.
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