FEMA on the Hot Seat as Biden Seeks Disaster Relief Package

Happy Wednesday! We’re no marketing experts, but if a rebrand involves your chief creative officer assuring industry journalists that you have “not been sniffing the white stuff—this is real,” then you may have missed the mark.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Ukrainian military struck a target inside Russia Tuesday with U.S.-provided long-range ATACMS missiles for the first time, according to reports from unnamed Ukrainian and American officials. The strike, which came on the 1,000th day of the war, reportedly hit a Russian weapons arsenal near the town of Karachev approximately 70 miles from the Ukrainian border. Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin officially lowered the threshold for his military’s use of nuclear weapons, allowing for a nuclear retaliation to even a conventional weapons strike. The move is an apparent response to the Biden administration’s greenlighting of strikes inside Russian territory with U.S.-supplied missiles. 
• A new report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog—indicates that Iran has added to its supply of uranium enriched to close to weapons grade. The confidential report, which was seen by several outlets on Tuesday, found that Iran had grown its 164-kilogram stock of uranium enriched to 60 percent to 182 kilograms since this summer. The 60 percent enriched uranium could quickly be converted to 90 percent weapons-grade uranium, and the current stockpile, once enriched, could provide enough uranium for four nuclear bombs.
• A Hong Kong court sentenced 45 pro-democracy activists and former lawmakers to years of prison time Wednesday—individual sentences ranged from four to 10 years. The group had been arrested in 2021 following the Communist Chinese Party’s imposition of a national security law designed to crack down on dissent. Jimmy Lai—the self-made billionaire and publisher of the since-shuttered Apple Daily—is expected to testify in his own national security trial today. Lai was arrested in December 2020 on charges of collusion with foreign forces and fraud that international observers and Lai’s legal team have dismissed as a pretense to punish his pro-democracy views. 
• Russia vetoed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution Monday calling for a ceasefire in the war in Sudan. The resolution, drafted by the U.K. and Sierra Leone, was supported by every other member country on the council, but Russia’s U.N. representative claimed the measure was just an excuse to meddle in Sudan’s affairs. The veto drew condemnation from British and American officials. 
• President-elect Donald Trump said Monday that he will nominate former Republican congressman and current Fox Business host Sean Duffy to serve as secretary of transportation. Trump also announced Tuesday his nomination of Dr. Mehmet Oz—the daytime TV personality who lost his 2022 Senate bid to John Fetterman—to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He also tapped Howard Lutnick—a billionaire financial services executive and co-chair of Trump’s transition team—to serve as secretary of commerce and Linda McMahon, the Small Business Administration administrator in Trump’s term, to serve as the secretary of education.

FEMA Chief Faces Accusations of Political Bias in the Agency

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Deanne Criswell was summoned to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to defend an agency beset by accusations of political bias in the wake of one of the most expensive hurricane seasons in American history. 

The timing could not have been worse.

On Monday, the Biden administration requested $98 billion from Congress to pay for ongoing disaster relief efforts for Americans affected by a series of major natural disasters, such as last month’s Hurricane Milton, which struck Florida and southern Georgia. 

The amount requested is nearly five times larger than the original $20 billion* that Congress authorized for FEMA for fiscal year 2024—but not all of it is meant for the disaster response agency: $40 billion would go to FEMA, while $24 billion is designated for the Department of Agriculture, $12 billion for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, $8 billion for the Department of Transportation, $4 billion for the Environmental Protection Agency, and $2 billion for the Small Business Administration. 

It’s a huge amount of money, covering not only FEMA’s main spending outlays—quick-response disaster relief efforts, aid to individuals, and grants to communities repairing and rebuilding infrastructure—but also disaster recovery programs for farmers, infrastructure repair efforts led by the Department of Transportation, and disaster loans to homeowners, renters, and nonprofits. 

The frequency and cost of natural disasters have only grown in recent years. Before Hurricane Milton hit Florida, Hurricane Helene wreaked historic havoc on the Southeast. Residents of Asheville, North Carolina, were under a boil water advisory until Tuesday, 53 days after the hurricane’s landfall. Last year, wildfires devastated Maui. The severity of these disasters has been dictated by a combination of factors including worsening conditions—particularly droughts—driven by climate change, poor environmental management, and aging infrastructure. 

And the bills are stacking up. 

From 1980 through October 2024, the U.S. has experienced 400 separate weather and climate disasters in which the costs and damages have totaled $1 billion or more, totaling $2.7 trillion, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. The annual average of events from 1980 to 2023 was 8.5, but the average from the last five full years of data (2019-2023) is 20.4. There have been 24 disaster events so far in 2024. 

Public attention in recent weeks has focused on a scandal emerging from FEMA’s relief efforts in Lake Placid, Florida, in the wake of Hurricane Milton. On November 8, the Daily Wire reported that the supervisor of a team responding to hurricane survivors in the area told workers to avoid houses with a flag or yard signs supporting Donald Trump. 

According to multiple government employees who spoke to the Daily Wire, the supervisor in question, Marn’i Washington, told workers verbally and over a Microsoft Teams chat that “best practices” included hydrating regularly, working in pairs, and avoiding “homes advertising Trump.” According to those workers, at least 20 homes were skipped from late October to early November, meaning that they missed out on qualifying for emergency FEMA assistance. 

After the story broke, Criswell released a statement that said the supervisor had been fired. “This is a clear violation of FEMA’s core values and principles to help people regardless of their political affiliation,” she said. “This was reprehensible.” But Washington, the fired supervisor, told NewsNation in an interview that she was being “framed” for departmental policy and for political hostility that FEMA teams experienced in Florida. “It just so happened that, unfortunately, most of the hostile encounters, those running trends, did have those campaign signs,” Washington said. “My orders come from my superior, and I simply just execute.”

Last week, Ashley Moody, Florida’s Republican attorney general, announced that her state would be suing FEMA for violating the civil rights of Trump-supporting Floridians. “Hurricane season is not over, and the federal agency in charge of emergency response is embroiled in scandal–caught withholding aid from storm victims in Florida who support President Trump,” she said.

And then there was Tuesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing. 

Some Republicans on the committee went beyond condemning the actions of the FEMA supervisors and framed the incident as part of a far larger issue of pervasive progressive bias in the federal bureaucracy. “This is part of a mindset that’s in government. This is the scary part, because I think it’s broader,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, when discussing the Microsoft Teams chats.

“While Democrats are complaining about this lengthy hearing and about President Trump coming in and slashing and reducing the size of government, I just want to say let the purge begin, because there’s people that are homeless right now in western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, Georgia,” said GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. She also attacked FEMA’s commitment to making “equity a foundation of emergency management” in its mission statement. 

 “I do not believe there is a widespread cultural problem,” stated Criswell, when pressed on the issue by Jordan, Taylor Greene, and others. 

There was little discussion of the FEMA funding bill in the hearing. Still, its prospects for passage look fairly favorable. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, said last month that Congress would consider a funding bill after communities hit by disasters had calculated their costs. “Congress will act in a bipartisan fashion to supply what is needed to help these communities recover, the appropriate amount that the federal government should do,” he said. 

As long as the bill passes by the December funding deadline, the disaster relief fund that FEMA utilizes to distribute aid will be able to keep functioning in the meantime. But other, smaller programs at other agencies are already suffering: The Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program is already out of money, and last week Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky blocked an attempt to fund it introduced by GOP Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina. 

Johnson reiterated his support for passing a bill on Monday, even as he reserved judgment on the final size of the funding package. “And we’re going to make sure we deliver for the hurricane victims and the people that have suffered from that,” he said. 

Worth Your Time

• Writing for the Washington Post, Republican Rep. Buddy Carter of Georgia made a curious case: More of his colleagues should join him in sleeping in their offices while in session. “I submit that Congress would be more effective if every member slept in their office because there is inherent value in getting to know people across the aisle as people rather than as just the opposition,” Carter wrote. “There’s no official count of how many of us call the Hill home when we’re in town, but I know at least a few dozen members who do. There’s a bond among those of us who wake up on a cot or couch, brush our teeth over the same sinks, venture to one of the cafeterias for a hot cup of coffee, and, at the end of the day, fall asleep to the faint scratches of the building’s worst tenants, the mice.” 
• Bastrop, Texas, is a town of 12,000 outside of Austin that is on the cusp of becoming something of a boomtown thanks to Elon Musk. “The world’s richest person has made a growing homestead for his various businesses in Bastrop County. Starlink, a division of Musk’s SpaceX that makes internet satellites, has a 500,000-square-foot manufacturing facility just 15 minutes away from Bastrop’s historic downtown,” Jessica Matthews wrote for Fortune. “Musk’s tunneling venture, the Boring Company, has a research and development center, and social media site X (born in San Francisco as Twitter), will soon break ground on its headquarters here. Since moving into the area three years ago, Musk’s companies have become some of the largest employers in what has long been considered a commuter town, and signs of Musk-ification are spreading. Boring Company employees wearing ‘Tunnel Mars’ T-shirts stroll past pickleball courts at Hyperloop Plaza. Inside the plaza’s hangarlike structure, housing high-end general store the Boring Bodega, a pub, and even a barber, vintage Musk memorabilia (like the $500 flamethrower the Boring Company once sold as a lark) are on display.”

Presented Without Comment

Reason: Pentagon Fails 7th Audit in a Row but Hopes to Pass by 2028

Also Presented Without Comment

Bloomberg: [UK Prime Minister Keir] Starmer Confronts Xi [Jinping] on Human Rights at G-20. It Did Not Go Well 

The British premier brought up his concerns over sanctioned lawmakers, human rights, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the case of former media mogul Jimmy Lai. 

As Starmer mentioned those points of tension, Chinese officials stood up and ordered British journalists out of the room before the premier had finished his remarks. While the British premier’s entourage tried to resist and allow the reporters to stay, the Chinese team physically moved them out of the room.

In the Zeitgeist 

Tennis legend Rafael Nadal played his last professional match at the Davis Cup on Tuesday, losing to Botic van de Zandschulp of the Netherlands. “The way I would like to be remembered more is like a good person from a small village in Mallorca,” the 38-year-old said after the match. “Just a kid that followed their dreams.” Here are some of Nadal’s greatest shots from a career that spanned more than two decades. 

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: Nick argued (🔒) that Putin could actually make good on his latest round of nuclear threats.
• On the site: David Drucker reports on the ballot-counting shenanigans in the Pennsylvania Senate race between David McCormick and Bob Casey, Kevin examines the trip to Mar-a-Lago by Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, and Adam Rousselle explores how the CCP is cracking down on the dissent resulting from China’s economic woes.

Let Us Know

Do you think members of Congress would get along better if they all slept in their offices on Capitol Hill?

Correction, November 20, 2024: This newsletter originally inaccurately described the size of a potential relief package as $20 million rather than $20 billion.