Lawmakers hope to avoid repeating fiasco that followed Superstorm Sandy

Conservatives warn that relief bill better leave out the pork

Officials eager to help Texas recover from Hurricane Harvey hope to avoid the political squall over disaster aid that followed Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the last major storm that pummeled the USA.

Lawmakers from New York and New Jersey took to Twitter to make clear they were ready to support disaster aid for the battered Gulf Coast, even though many of their colleagues from that region opposed the aid package approved after Sandy struck the Northeast nearly five years ago.

President Trump said Monday that he had spoken to congressional leaders, and he expects relief to come “very, very quickly.”

But even as Houston tried to clear its flooded streets and shovel out the muck from Harvey, some conservatives warned Congress not to fill a relief bill with pork-barrel spending.

“I have never been opposed to relief bills that truly meet an emergency need. As we look at helping our neighbors in Texas, our hearts can’t avoid being touched by the devastation we see,” said Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., who chairs the arch-conservative Freedom Caucus.

“Sadly and far too often, relief packages become a vehicle for all kinds of special interest and pet projects that have nothing to do with the devastation,” Meadows said. “Narrowly focused relief packages would get conservative support and would only lose that support if the legislation strays from its core mission.”

Relief from Sandy came before Congress during the lame-duck session after the 2012 election.

To attract votes from reluctant senators, congressional leaders added provisions that were unrelated to that storm. The maneuver angered fiscal conservatives.

The House of Representatives broke the Sandy bill into separate pieces and removed many unrelated sections the Senate sought. After the House rejected a proposal to require disaster funding to be offset by cuts elsewhere in the budget, many Republicans voted against the package.

The Sandy aid bill passed the House only because of overwhelming Democratic support.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency projects the amount available for disaster relief will be about $1.5 billion by Sept. 30, considerably less than what Harvey is likely to need once costs are tallied in Texas and neighboring Louisiana.

“FEMA, right now, we have the money necessary for Texas and Louisiana if we need,” Trump said at a White House news conference. “But the real number, which will be many billions of dollars, will go through Congress. I think it’ll happen very quickly, it’ll go very fast.”

Hurricane Ike, which struck Texas’ Gulf Coast in 2008 but resulted in far less flooding than Harvey, cost $4.5 billion in disaster relief funds.

“We’re going to be here for several years,” FEMA Administrator Brock Long said Monday during a news conference in Corpus Christi with Gov. Greg Abbott and other Texas officials.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican who railed against his party’s leaders when Sandy aid was held up in 2012, criticized those from Texas who opposed it.

“The congressional members in Texas are hypocrites, and I said back in 2012 they’d be proven to be hypocrites,” Christie said Monday at a school opening in Newark. “When you’re a state that has any kind of coastal exposure like Texas does to the Gulf, you’re going to wind up having some type of disaster.”

Disaster aid may not be the only issue looming in Congress, given Harvey’s massive flooding.

Harvey is likely to inundate the National Flood Insurance Program, which is about $25 billion in debt after paying claims to victims of Hurricane Katrina in

2005, Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and floods in Louisiana last year.

A post-Katrina law gave the program authority to borrow up to $20 billion, and that was increased by $10 billion after Sandy. Congress would have to increase that line of credit with the federal Treasury if damage from Harvey is as bad as expected, several experts said.

“It may be a matter of semantics, but I don’t consider that disaster aid. The government is running an insurance company, and the insurance company owes money to policyholders who paid their premiums,” said R.L. Lehmann, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, a free-market think tank.

“This is not discretionary: You have to pay claims to people who have a contract,” Lehmann said.

FEMA insures about 5 million properties nationally, including

585,000 in Texas, about half of which are in the counties that include Houston and Galveston. Most of that FEMA-backed coverage is provided through commercial insurance companies that sell and service policies.

“If damage is similar to Sandy, and that doesn’t seem like an unreasonable assumption, then it could be in the $8 billion to $10 billion range,” Lehmann said. “Some guesses are that it could be more than Katrina, or $15 billion to $16 billion.”