Top Lawmakers Call on Congress to Pass Hurricane Relief Bill

Key lawmakers started a push Monday for Congress to provide emergency disaster funds for Texas, as the scale of damage from Hurricane Harvey became apparent.

“We will need to put together an emergency supplemental appropriations bill,” Republican John Culberson, a senior member of the House spending panel who represents Houston, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “No one could have ever predicted or expected a catastrophe of this magnitude to descend on the Houston area.”

Culberson was joined by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California in calling for a bill. Pelosi made clear that any bill should be exempt from budget caps that require offsetting spending cuts.

“Republicans must be ready to join Democrats in passing a timely relief bill that makes all necessary resources available through emergency spending,” Pelosi said in a statement.

It’s not clear yet whether Republican leaders would back such a bill or when it would come to a vote.

Additional Funds

So far, the Trump administration hasn’t determined whether additional funds will be needed, acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke said Monday on Bloomberg Television. She said if additional funds are needed, the Department of Homeland Security will work with Congress to obtain them.

A House Republican aide said that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had $1.8 billion available for immediate disaster needs as of Friday, adding that amount is sufficient, for now. FEMA also has the authority to shift money into its disaster relief fund from other accounts.

A deluge of rain and rising floodwaters has left Houston immersed. Tropical Storm Harvey, which made landfall as a category 4 hurricane, has drifted back toward the Gulf of Mexico and is poised to regain strength before crashing ashore again, this time on the Texas-Louisiana border.

Harvey’s cost could reach $30 billion when including the impact on the labor force, power grid, transportation and other elements that support the region’s energy sector, Chuck Watson, a disaster modeler with Enki Research, said in an email Monday. That would place it among the top eight hurricanes to ever strike the U.S. David Havens, an insurance analyst at Imperial Capital, said the final tally might be as high as $100 billion.

Vice President Mike Pence said that as many as a half-a-million people may be ultimately eligible for assistance.

Adding a Harvey spending bill onto Congress’s busy September agenda could affect efforts by Republican leaders to pass a stopgap spending bill by Sept. 30 to prevent a government shutdown and to raise the nation’s debt ceiling.

Funding for Harvey relief, for example, could be used to win the votes of the 36-member Texas House delegation for a stopgap spending bill or a debt limit measure.

Republican Divide

The Republican Party, however, has been divided in the past over whether disaster spending needs to be offset by other domestic spending cuts, a debate that could return over Harvey response funding.

Both of the Republican senators representing Texas, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, voted against a $50 billion Superstorm Sandy spending bill in early 2013 after pushing for spending cuts to be attached. Cornyn and Cruz say they voted “no” in the end because of unrelated spending attached to the package.

Representative Peter King, a New York Republican, lashed out at Cruz on Twitter Saturday over his Sandy vote.

“Ted Cruz Texas cohorts voted vs NY/NJ aid after Sandy but I’ll vote 4 Harvey aid. NY wont abandon Texas. 1 bad turn doesnt deserve another,” King tweeted.

A conservative push to stop any Harvey aid that adds to the deficit could also complicate a GOP push later in the year for steep tax cuts that add to the deficit.