Florida Democrat Warns FEMA Is ‘Going to Fail This Summer’ Due to Funding Cuts

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) offered a dire warning while testifying before the House Rules Committee on Wednesday, saying that he believes FEMA will “fail” by the summer due to budget cuts.

Moskowitz, who previously served as the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, began his remarks by tearing into the Trump administration for pausing federal funds for FEMA.

“Grants are paused. What does that mean that all grants are paused? That means states right now that are going into hurricane season don’t know whether or not they’re going to get a declaration, which this administration is holding back. What happens if you don’t get a declaration? Just go ask the governor of Arkansas, Governor Huckabee, who worked for the president,” he began, adding:

Took her weeks to get the declaration. You can’t move, you can’t respond, you can’t spend money because you don’t know that you’re going to get reimbursed. Fiscally constrained cities and counties don’t make decisions. It’s analysis paralysis.

It’s actually in direct contradiction with what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to speed up FEMA. We’re trying to make it faster, right? Which is why I have a bill with Byron Donalds to get FEMA out of Homeland Security. Homeland is abusing FEMA. They’re using FEMA to do grants for the other 22 agencies.

The mayor of St. Louis made headlines earlier in the week when she went on cable news and pleaded for help from the federal government, saying that federal relief workers had yet to reach her city in the wake of a deadly tornado.

“Nothing at FEMA has been made more efficient. In fact, I would tell you that the Secretary of Homeland Security has turned FEMA into the Newark airport, okay? It is going to fail this summer!” Moskowitz warned, adding:

And so look, there’s no doubt that FEMA needed reform, but what they’ve done at Homeland is they’ve taken something that needed help and they broke it further. Do you know what happens if there’s no FEMA to the state that the speaker represents or Steve Scalise represents? Louisiana goes bankrupt.

Without FEMA, when there’s a hurricane that comes in from the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of America, comes right into Louisiana, they’re bankrupt. Alabama’s bankrupt, Mississippi’s bankrupt. You get an F5, F4 tornado in tornado alley, those states go bankrupt without FEMA. And yet, I don’t see my Republican colleagues calling out the administration on how we’re gonna save FEMA and reform it.

Moskowitz went on to directly accuse Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of hobbling FEMA. “I don’t think the president is aware of the current condition of FEMA and its potential inability to perform. We may get lucky, and hopefully we do. Hopefully, we don’t have a bad hurricane this season. Hopefully, we don’t have some unforeseen disaster like an earthquake that hasn’t happened since the ’90s. Lord knows we had a one-in-100-year pandemic in the first term of the Trump administration. Hopefully, we don’t have anything like that because they have decimated FEMA in ways that we won’t know until it happens,” he fumed, adding:

And listen, I know the chairwoman represents an area that didn’t have the best experience after Helene. There’s no question about that. There’s dramatic improvement that needs to be done at FEMA. But I’m deeply concerned about what’s happened at Homeland, and I don’t think the president is aware of the current condition that the secretary has put him and the men and women that work there and the states that are going to go to FEMA and rely on them to help them in their time of need, and those resources are going to come slower.

Think about it. You don’t get to move your logistics, you don’t move your water, your ice, your power generation, your… any of your stuff. And let me remind you, I did this for a living, for a Republican governor. I worked for Ron DeSantis for two and a half years, took my political hat off, so I’m not giving you partisan coverage—I’m giving you the current state of affairs of an agency that has been absolutely destroyed.

Watch the clip above via C-SPAN.