Florida’s Big Bend region is facing Hurricane Helene’s onslaught this evening, bringing warnings of 20-foot storm surges, dangerous winds as far north as the Carolinas, and possibly catastrophic flooding across the southern Appalachians. And Congress has wrapped up its pre-election agenda without securing new disaster relief funds. The stopgap spending deal that lawmakers approved Wednesday night failed to include a $10 billion supplemental infusion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency after congressional leaders capitulated to the House’s most conservative fiscal hawks, writes Andres Picon. The last minute exclusion of the aid — which would have been half of what the White House had requested — caught many lawmakers off guard. FEMA is staring down a $2 billion deficit in disaster relief funding that promises to only get worse. “They didn’t call me in and ask me for any advice,” said Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.), chair of the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, which funds FEMA. “Can you believe that?” House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said the move was necessary to stave off a government shutdown. “It was done in good faith,” he said. The funding omission was made all the more striking by the fact that lawmakers left Washington two days earlier than planned, in part because of the hurricane, Andy writes. Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz opposed efforts to preemptively appropriate disaster dollars, while GOP Sen. Rick Scott skipped the vote to head home to Florida ahead of Helene’s arrival. Big picture: Global warming is fueling stronger, more destructive hurricanes while populations in high-risk coastal areas continue to grow, Chelsea Harvey wrote recently. Meteorologists can now forecast hurricane paths and intensity with higher accuracy, but damages are still increasing. That means policies to preemptively protect communities from climate-related disasters haven’t caught up to science. And funding to support the recovery of hard hit areas, whose numbers are ballooning, is increasingly scarce. FEMA last month imposed new spending restrictions, stopping payments for ongoing rebuilding projects in order to save cash for new emergencies. The country is also in the midst of an insurance crisis, where companies have sharply increased rates or even dropped coverage as they face huge losses from increasingly frequent extreme weather. In Florida, where the insurance market has long flirted with collapse, losses associated with Helene could be as much as $6 billion, according to Gallagher Re, a global reinsurance broker.
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