One of the excuses you always hear when there’s a massive failure by the Biden-Harris administration is that no one could have seen it coming. No one could have predicted that the Inflation Reduction Act would actually increase inflation. No one could have predicted that the Afghan government would collapse immediately after we pulled out our troops, leading to a security breakdown and the deaths of 13 U.S. military personnel. No one could have predicted that shipping pallets of cash to Iran would provide funding for a new campaign of terrorist attacks by Iran’s proxies, and so on.
The truth though is that all of these disasters were easily foreseeable. The problem is that the people in charge of predicting the consequences of all of these policies are either grossly incompetent, or malicious. At every step, they have lied to Americans about what they know — or should know — was about to happen. And there is maybe no better illustration of this problem than the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene, which has now killed more than 200 people.
Take a look at what the DHS Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, was saying just three months ago. Mayorkas, as head of the DHS, oversees the federal disaster relief agency, FEMA. On June 21st, Mayorkas went in front of the cameras to boast that FEMA was, “tremendously prepared” for the upcoming hurricane season. In fact, he doesn’t just say that FEMA is tremendously prepared for hurricanes. He says they’re prepared for wildfires, extreme heat, and a variety of other disasters. We can handle all of it, he said. Watch:
“This is what we do,” says Mayorkas as he smiles. It’s all very reassuring. Now, admittedly, the words “tremendously prepared” can be interpreted in a few different ways. And unfortunately, Mayorkas wasn’t more specific. But ordinarily, when the official overseeing a disaster relief agency says that they’re “tremendously prepared”, they’re saying that, at a minimum, they have all the resources they need to quickly and effectively respond to whatever natural disasters may occur.
So it was more than a little surprising to hear the DHS Secretary on Wednesday, announcing that actually, FEMA is out of money. They don’t even have the cash to make it through hurricane season. Watch:
It’s easy to become desensitized to all the lying that we’ve heard from this administration. It’s easy to roll your eyes when you see even more evidence that these people, at a minimum, are grossly incompetent. But this is truly another level. Imagine this kind of thing happening in literally any business in the country. Imagine the cook at iHOP telling his boss that he’s “tremendously prepared” for the breakfast rush, and then the customers show up and actually, it turns out that there’s no flour or eggs or bacon in the kitchen. They need an emergency shipment because they’re all out of ingredients. How long do you think that cook would have a job exactly? Five seconds? Less?
As you just heard at the tail end of that Fox News report, this is starting to look like something much worse than incompetence. It looks a bit like embezzlement, actually.
First of all, didn’t the government’s fiscal year just start on October 1st? How are they out of money already? And why exactly was FEMA administering billion-dollar “services” to foreign nationals, including illegal aliens living inside this country?
As The New York Post reports:
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) allocated $640.9 million this year in FEMA-administered funds to aid state and local governments coping with the influx of asylum seekers … [And] DHS allocated $780 million for the migrant crisis last year through the FEMA Emergency Food and Shelter Program, which funds relief not associated with natural disasters, and the FEMA Shelter and Services Program, which was authorized in late 2022 by Congress to respond to the migrant crisis.
That money, according to the DHS website, goes to ““families and individuals encountered by the Department of Homeland Security.” There doesn’t need to be an emergency or a natural disaster or anything like that. These people just need to come into this country illegally, and they’re eligible.
In response to this reporting, the DHS claimed that Congress didn’t authorize that $1.4 billion to go to American citizens. It was supposedly earmarked for “the migrant crisis,” meaning it was never intended for Americans. I guess that’s supposed to be reassuring, somehow. But that still doesn’t explain why the DHS secretary said FEMA was well-prepared just three months ago. And more importantly, it doesn’t explain why we’re spending so much money on providing “food and shelter” to illegal migrants when we don’t even have enough money to fund disaster relief for American citizens. And that’s not even getting into the hundreds of billions of dollars we’ve spent on Ukraine, which comes out to more than $5,000 per Ukrainian.
By comparison, American citizens aren’t getting much. As the Post reports:
A relatively paltry $4 million has been paid directly to families and individuals in the week since Hurricane Helene ravaged the Southeast, killing at least 202 people and causing severe flooding damage from Florida to North Carolina.
For her part, acting president Kamala Harris has announced that affected families in this country are eligible for a grand total of $750 in FEMA assistance. Watch:
A whole $750. That’s what FEMA can give American citizens who just lost their homes. And to be clear, that’s not because this hurricane season was unusually catastrophic. And it’s not because FEMA has been doing heroic work that turned out to be far more expensive than they could’ve possibly anticipated.
In reality, FEMA has reported that it’s been running out of money for a long time now. A year ago, in the middle of hurricane season, FEMA disclosed that it was experiencing a massive budget shortfall of several billion dollars. This is a report from July of 2023. Watch:
FEMA’s excuse last year was that there were a lot of unexpected disasters — fires, mudslides, and so on. So you’d think that, after running out of money, they’d make sure to cover the budget shortfall in time for the next hurricane season. After all, the federal government can print money out of thin air for whatever reason it wants. They don’t care about inflation, as we’ve learned. They’ll just print it, if they care enough. Why didn’t that happen here? Was there some issue with the money printer? Did Congress reject the budget for some reason? If so, at the very least, you’d expect that the DHS secretary would complain about that. You wouldn’t think he’d go on television to brag about how “tremendously prepared” they are.
That’s especially true after FEMA’s failed handling of the Maui fires last year. As you might remember, residents said that FEMA’s assistance was both scattershot and insufficient after the blaze. They were also outraged that FEMA officials were hanging out in luxury hotels instead of helping. Watch:
“It’s not what it looks like,” says FEMA. And maybe that’s true. Maybe it was vitally necessary for FEMA to rent out a bunch of luxury hotels in Hawaii. We really don’t know. But every indication we have now is that this agency isn’t capable of managing its budget or responding effectively to disasters. So there are a lot of reasons to ask questions about this whole arrangement, especially after-the-fact.
Will anyone in the media ask about any of this? Probably not. Deanne Criswell is the woman who runs FEMA. She happens to be the first woman to ever hold that job. So she has the whole identity politics angle going for her. Maybe that’s why, as FEMA suffers one humiliation after another, no one’s even suggesting that she should lose her job, along with the DHS secretary. Or maybe Deanne Criswell is untouchable because the Biden-Harris administration wants her to do exactly what she’s doing, which is to sabotage recovery efforts. Maybe that’s what the government wants.
They’re certainly doing everything they can to create that impression. The local CBS affiliate in North Carolina just reported that 1,000 soldiers in the state are sitting around and doing nothing, instead of assisting in disaster relief:
President Joe Biden activated 1,000 U.S. Army soldiers for deployment to western North Carolina. More than 24 hours later, troops are still waiting to deploy from Fort Liberty. The soldiers are supposed to assist with delivering food and essential supplies to isolated communities devastated by Helene. … The U.S. Army said soldiers with the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Liberty are standing by and ready if the request for support comes. … The North Carolina Army National Guard, which is leading the ground recovery efforts, tells CBS17 they are still assessing the needs in the area and they have not made an official request for support from the U.S. Army.
So the Army hasn’t been called in for some reason. A thousand soldiers have been activated, but they’re not doing anything. Meanwhile civilians who try to help are being prevented from doing so.
Here’s congressman Cory Mills, explaining that because Joe Biden was in the area, the federal government just prevented civilian rescue pilots and aid workers from saving lives in the aftermath of this disaster. Watch:
So, to recap: FEMA doesn’t provide early warning, or a timely mandatory evacuation order. They don’t provide any significant assistance after the storm. They divert huge amounts of resources to foreign nationals who have no legal justification for being in this country. They shut down the air space to block civilian rescue flights. They say they’re out of money. And just three months ago, they told us they were “tremendously prepared” for hurricane season.
Watching all this, you have to ask why we’re even paying taxes. Why are we paying FEMA billions of dollars every year, only to make disasters even more deadly? Why are we funneling our money to people who clearly hate us? Ask yourself: If the Biden-Harris administration wanted to go out of its way to punish American citizens, what exactly would they be doing differently?
At some point, complete and total incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. And anyone who’s been paying attention to FEMA over the past year — as well as everyone living in the areas that have been decimated by this hurricane — knows that we are now well past that point.
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