Commentary: Congress Just Gave Biden-Harris an Extra $20 Billion ‘Available Immediately’ for Hurricane Helene

by Richard Manning

The Biden-Harris administration is lying to the American public when they claim that FEMA is out of money.  Speaker Mike Johnson just posted on X that, “Last Wednesday, I led Congress to provide $20 billion extra dollars (available immediately) to FEMA so they would have operational funds right now to respond to Helene.”

Last Wednesday, I led Congress to provide $20 billion extra dollars (available immediately) to FEMA so they would have operational funds right now to respond to Helene.

President Biden and VP Harris have failed terribly in that response. They knew this storm was coming but did… pic.twitter.com/jkxp5e6ofj

— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) October 4, 2024

Here is the truth.  Speaker Johnson, leading the House GOP, responsibly appropriated a massive amount of money to FEMA so they could immediately meet the hurricane emergency. Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris administration has not only been slow to respond, with anecdotal accounts of soldiers at Fort Bragg in North Carolina being denied leave to rescue their friends and neighbors in the Smoky Mountains. Rather than going into overdrive with a massive public-private search and rescue mission, the Biden-Harris administration has let the people of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina and Virginia down through their deadly failure to treat the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene as a major emergency.

It is important for America to know that Congress did its job – they gave the Biden-Harris administration money to meet the immediate needs and the Harris team which Joe Biden has said is running the White House operation now, failed miserably.  Whether they failed due to incompetence or due to the utter contempt they hold for rural Trump voters, the deaths which have occurred as a result of their inaction are a black mark on our nation’s history.

Not to put too fine a point over it, but sometimes it seems that this administration cares far more about lives lost in foreign countries than those lost here in America, and this disaster of a response is just more evidence that the Biden-Harris administration puts Americans last, and I for one am sick of it.

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Richard Manning is the president of  Americans for Limited Government. 
Photo “Hurricane Helene Storm Damage” by Speaker Mike Johnston.