White House : Releasing Maria relief for Puerto Rico is a ‘priority’
The Biden administration is working to release hurricane disaster aid for Puerto Rico that had been withheld by the Trump administration, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday.
Psaki, speaking during her press briefing, said the president has made it a “priority” to release the Hurricane Maria-related funding.
“We are working to do so,” she said. The Biden White House has not yet set a public timeline for when it expects to release the additional aid money.
Of the roughly $66 billion in aid Congress approved for Puerto Rico after the 2017 storm, only about $17.3 billion — less than a third of the total amount — has been distributed to the American territory. Federal agencies have promised to distribute around $41.7 billion, according to late-January figures from the Central Office of Recovery, Reconstruction and Resiliency, which oversees federally funded reconstruction projects in Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rican officials have said the absence of the approved money has stalled recovery efforts. The funds have been slow to reach the island in part because of Trump-era funding requirements that responded to the previous administration’s fears of mismanagement and corruption in the Puerto Rican government.
Puerto Rico is still recovering from Hurricane Maria, which killed thousands and demolished critical infrastructure in 2017, even as it grapples with an earthquake sequence that began in late 2019 and the coronavirus pandemic. Both Puerto Rican officials and federal officials have said that the delays in receiving the hurricane relief money have pushed back infrastructure repairs and increased the burden on residents.
In the Biden campaign plan for Puerto Rico, the president said he would “accelerate access to promised reconstruction funding” for the island and promised to “immediately instruct” the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and other federal government agencies to collaborate with the Puerto Rican government to distribute the money “efficiently” and “effectively” to the disaster-stricken island.
The two agencies that set aside the most funding for Puerto Rico recovery, according to both state and federal data — HUD and FEMA — have both set requirements considered onerous for the evaluation process for disbursements.
Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi recently told The Washington Post he has spoken privately with senior officials in the Biden White House about releasing the outstanding relief money.
More than 100 local Puerto Rican groups also virtually met with Biden officials last week, according to local daily El Nuevo Día, where disaster recovery and the disbursement of relief money was discussed.
Hurricane Maria was the third-costliest natural disaster in American history, incurring around $90 billion in damage, according to a National Hurricane Center report.
Despite the storm’s devastation, federal agencies under the Trump administration established additional oversight, and placed restrictions on already-approved disaster funding for the island. The White House alluded to Puerto Rico’s purported “long history of financial mismanagement and corruption” in a 2019 statement.