The Biden Team’s Disastrous Performance on Disaster Relief Putting American hurricane victims behind illegal aliens. by Joseph Klein
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-biden-teams-disastrous-performance-on-disaster-relief/
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has been promoted to the position of senior adviser to the president while continuing to serve as press secretary for the remainder of President Biden’s term. Ms. Jean-Pierre proved once again during her October 7th White House press briefing why the most accurate title for her service to the Biden-Harris administration is Chief Propaganda Officer. She resorted to the Biden-Harris administration’s customary accusation of “misinformation” when asked why the Biden administration is providing additional money to Lebanon while North Carolina residents in need are not getting enough federal disaster relief in the wake of Hurricane Helene. Ms. Jean-Pierre charged that the question asked by Fox News reporter Peter Doocy was premised on misinformation:
PETER DOOCY: President Biden is fond of saying, “Show me your budget and I will tell you what you value.” If he has money for people in Lebanon right now without Congress having to come back, what does it say about his values — there’s not enough money right now for people in North Carolina who need it. That’s not misinformation.
KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: Wait, no it is, your whole premise of the question is misinformation, sir. Yes, it is…the way you’re asking me the question is misinformation. There is money that we are allocating to the impacted areas, and there’s money there to help people who truly need it. There are survivors who need the funding — who need the funding, and it’s there.
PETER DOOCY: You can’t call a question that you don’t like “misinformation.”
The Biden-Harris administration believes that it can do so by weaponizing the words “misinformation/disinformation” to discredit and even censor any information that contradicts their party line. Vice President Kamala Harris and other senior members of the administration are beating the “misinformation” drum while spreading misinformation of their own. Contrary to their claims that the hard-hit communities in western North Carolina are getting all the federal resources they need, folks on the ground who are suffering say otherwise. North Carolina residents have been without adequate basic necessities, such as food, water, shelter, and means of communication, for too long. They have been relying primarily on volunteers and each other to deal with the destruction left behind by Hurricane Helene.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) does not have enough funding to make it through the rest of the hurricane season, according to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Moreover, as of October 6th, only nine percent of FEMA staff members were available to deal with Hurricane Milton or any other natural disaster to come, according to the agency’s daily operations briefing cited by the New York Times.
Yet despite all this, Vice President Kamala Harris proudly announced that her administration is sending nearly $157 million in additional assistance to Lebanon to meet the “essential needs” of the Lebanese people. These needs include “food, shelter, water, protection, and sanitation to help those who have been displaced by the recent conflict.” She noted that “This additional support brings total U.S. assistance to Lebanon over the last year to over $385 million.”
While lamenting the “increasingly dire humanitarian situation” in Lebanon, Vice President Harris neglected to mention that it is the Iranian terrorist proxy Hezbollah who is responsible for the manmade humanitarian disaster in Lebanon. Hezbollah launched unprovoked rocket and missile attacks against Israel a year ago in solidarity with Hamas. Israel finally decided in recent weeks that it had enough and mounted a forceful counterattack within Lebanon to eliminate Hezbollah’s leadership, command and control centers, and advanced weaponry.
Hezbollah has brought the “increasingly dire humanitarian situation” upon Lebanon, a country that the terrorist group has largely controlled with Iran’s support. Nevertheless, the Biden-Harris administration is naively sending nearly $157 million more in relief funds to Lebanon without ensuring that none of this money will end up in Hezbollah’s hands. Meanwhile, Americans are not being provided with enough federal assistance to cope with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. So far, they have only received a paltry $750 each in immediate assistance. And many more Americans impacted by Hurricane Milton and other hurricanes to follow will not get the federal disaster relief they need to survive and rebuild.
As Florida Senator Rick Scott wrote: “If we renamed Florida and North Carolina to Lebanon and Ukraine, maybe Kamala Harris would send disaster relief faster. She’s made it clear that being Americans puts us last in line.”
The Biden-Harris administration has rendered FEMA’s disaster relief program much less effective in other ways as well. For example, FEMA has been criticized for allocating $640.9 million this year in FEMA-administered funds to state and local governments dealing with the influx of illegal immigrants.
“This is easy,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott posted on X. “Mayorkas and FEMA — immediately stop spending money on illegal immigration resettlement and redirect those funds to areas hit by the hurricane. Put Americans first.”
FEMA claims that it does not have discretion to divert the money specifically allocated by Congress for addressing the illegal immigrant crisis to natural disaster relief. But this begs the question as to why the Biden-Harris administration did not request Congress to repurpose any of that money as the hurricane season was approaching.
In addition, a Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s report revealed last August that, as of October 2022, FEMA had more than $7 billion in “unliquidated funds” that were meant to relieve declared disasters from 2012 or earlier. These funds, the inspector general’s report stated, “could potentially be returned to the Disaster Relief Fund.” When the inspector general’s report was published, what did the Biden-Harris administration do regarding this revelation, if anything? Did it try to ascertain whether these billions of dollars that are potentially returnable to the Disaster Relief Fund could be made available immediately to fund today’s disaster relief needs? If not, why not?
Adding insult to injury, Biden-Harris’s FEMA prioritizes “disaster equity” in distributing natural disaster relief aid over what achieves the greatest good for the greatest amount of people. In 2022, Vice President Harris said that the impact of hurricanes and other extreme natural disasters should be addressed “in a way that is about giving resources based on equity.”
Prior to Hurricanes Helene and Hurricane Milton, FEMA had already handed out millions of dollars in grants intended to increase “equity” in responding to disasters in what FEMA calls “underserved communities” defined by group identities.
In short, distributing relief assistance starting with the persons most in need, regardless of race, ethnic background, sexual orientation, or gender, is less important to the Biden-Harris administration than engaging in top-down, group identity-driven social engineering.
The truth is that FEMA’s performance in fulfilling its core mission of providing Americans with natural disaster relief has been a disaster on the Biden-Harris administration’s watch. Misinformation about FEMA’s actual performance to date is coming from the administration itself.
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