By Monica Showalter www.americanthinker.com
When Democrats gaslight and divert attention from major issues, J.D. Vance has a pretty impressive way of cutting to the quick of things. He did so with the Haitian migrants controversy in Ohio, and now he's done it again.
When Fox News journalists brought up that Republican complaints about FEMA blowing its budget on illegals and not having enough cash to help hurricane survivors, were being met by Democrats retorts that that was false owing to the federal budget structure, Vance did a pretty good job of getting to the quick of the problem and sorting the matter out.
Democrats have insisted that FEMA resources going to illegals and FEMA resources going to disaster aid came from two different pots of money, so the fact that FEMA was having trouble servicing citizens in disaster distress was unrelated to FEMA's care-and-feeding of illegals program.
The House resolution that most recently passed in June does indeed allocate funds for FEMA in tranches for disaster relief, "shelter and services" (for illegals, though the line-item I found said "homeless" which is another shape shifter), and many other programs were identified in the various tranches of cash to be spent.
Many sections also stipulate that any unused funds can transferred to other programs.
For a disaster agency, whose mission is premised on responding to unexpected events, that's a useful and probably necessary bit of flexibility in the agency's operations, because disasters are unpredictable.
Which of course means, that disaster cash could very well have been going to illegals given the emergency at the border with way more people rolling in than the Biden administration expected. The Pentagon is famous for shifting its congressional allocations around even as the budget says this much goes to 'x' and this much goes to 'y.' Why wouldn't FEMA be the same?
But as Vance pointed out, the broader problem with FEMA taking on the illegals, even if every penny was spent as allocated, means the agency is losing focus. The illegals funding is not part of its core mission.
In my last piece on this, I noted a tweet from a woman who said she heard that FEMA didn't have enough people to help North Carolina's hurricane victims because so many of their personnel had been shifted to the border. If that's true, then resources for disaster relief did indeed go to enabling illegals, and it's not going to show up in the congressional budget documents.
Once again, it raises questions as to why FEMA is in this line of work as a resettlement agency for those who crossed our border illegally. It can only distract from its primary mission to provide disaster aid because this sideline diverts resources.
And why is the money for this coming from Customs & Border Protection's budget for FEMA to administer instead of directly from Congress, which seems like a deplete-the-Border-Patrol scheme on the sly? Why was this illegals-care being allocated from another agency instead of handed out directly from Congress? That looks fishy, too.
There are all kinds of oddities -- FEMA spent $4 billion on COVID relief, its highest amount ever, when the pandemic ended three years ago?
How was that money really spent? Florida's Senators Rick Scott and Marco Rubio first noticed the problem last May.
The bottom line here, is that the agency has fallen victim to mission-creep on the labor-intensive matter of hosting tens of thousands of illegals. That has cut into its ability to achieve its core mission, which is disaster relief.
It was bad in fire-hit Lahaina, Hawaii, it's now very obvious in this Hurricane Helene aftermath, and now with a new hurricane is on the way, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas saying they may not have enough money to respond to that, that's a sign of things getting worse.
That's an agency that has done everything but pay attention to what it's supposed to do.
J.D. Vance had it right on that, and in his later suggestion that the military needed to be called in to coordinate the response. He's a good man for President Trump to have in a storm, the biggest of which will be in draining the Washington swamp in 2025, which will include making FEMA the efficient agency it once was.
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