Trump and Republicans can't even agree how to handle disasters

The Trump administration appears to be at odds with congressional Republicans on yet another issue: disaster relief.

Since President Trump took office, he’s slashed environmental regulations and proposed a budget that would cut funding to agencies on the front lines of disaster relief. At the same time, some Republicans in Congress are mobilizing to secure funding for disaster relief before disasters happen.

Last week, Congress passed a $15 billion disaster relief program to aid those affected by the back-to-back hurricanes which struck Florida and Texas. But some Republicans, fearing that federal spending could get out of hand, are fighting the funding.

Those Republicans, like South Carolina Rep. Mark Sanford, want disaster funding built into the budget. He argues that certain types of disasters have become predictable.

“The idea of an emergency is you never would’ve anticipated it would come our way, we have to fund it,” said Sanford said, according to BuzzFeed News. “You can anticipate that we are going to get hit some number of times, like clockwork, as a result of hurricanes, flooding, and fires and tornadoes.”

“They’re not emergencies,” Sanford said. “They are predictable tragic crises.”

(If that sounds like an acknowledgment from a Republican that climate change might bring with it natural disasters of increasing frequency and severity, it just might be: Sanford co-sponsored a resolution in March, along with 16 other Republicans, acknowledging the fact that human-driven climate change is real.)

Before the storms hit, Republicans expressed support for dipping into the already-reduced FEMA disaster funds to pay for Trump’s proposed border wall with Mexico. But as they send billions of dollars in federal relief funds to Florida and Texas, that proposal looks dead in the water.

But even as Republicans in Congress look to secure funding for disaster relief — even those claiming to act in service of “fiscal responsibility” — Trump has been slashing budgets at the agencies that prepare for and predict disasters and rolling back the environmental regulations that help mitigate the fallout of natural disasters.

The budget the Trump administration put forward in March, for example, cuts emergency relief from the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies by about 9 percent and asks that states and the private sector step up to make up the difference, according to the Washington Post. The proposed budget would also eliminate $667 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s budget — which was $13.9 billion in 2016 — and request that states match 25 percent of the FEMA money they get. Trump’s budget also cuts funding by 17 percent to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the federal organization responsible for monitoring and predicting hurricanes.

“Trump’s budget proposal was so drastic that when it came out, you saw lots of Republicans saying it was basically dead on arrival,” Ana Unruh Cohen, the Director of Government Affairs at the National Resources Defence Council, told VICE News. “A lot of those concerns were for places like NOAA and FEMA — places that are seen as critical to public safety.”

Environmental regulations, too, are dragging. For example, when Harvey hit Houston, refineries along the Gulf Coast shut down, a process that requires them to burn off tons of chemicals. A 2015 EPA rule would have made refineries follow pollution rules during emergency shutdowns. But industry groups and a handful of states, including Oklahoma, where now-EPA chief Scott Pruitt was attorney general, sued to keep the rule from being implemented. Now that Pruitt’s in charge of the EPA, he’s on the other side of the litigation. His agency has stalled the legal fight, keeping the rule in limbo.

During Harvey, refineries reported 27,000 tons of excess pollution. Now, FEMA, with help from the EPA, has to clean-up the mess. Before Pruitt, the EPA estimated that the rule would have prevented the emission of 50,000 tons of smog-causing volatile organic compounds per year.

And while congressional Republicans might not be in favor of regulations on industry, the cleanup from Harvey is prompting them to at least think ahead.