As the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security reaches the two-week mark, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Friday that it spent more than $5 billion in disaster relief funds this week, drawing down an account that held $9.6 billion two weeks ago.
A FEMA spokesperson said the funds were released in response to several specific disasters, including some that happened more than a decade ago, and warned that the disaster relief fund “is being rapidly depleted.” The spokesperson also accused Democrats of “playing political games” with disaster aid.
As Politico’s Thomas Frank and Jennifer Scholtes note, the release of the funds seems to contradict Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s recent statement that FEMA is “scaling back to bare-minimum, life-saving operations only.”
CNN’s Gabe Cohen reported Thursday that the states receiving portions of the $5 billion in disaster funds do not include several led by Democrats who have clashed with President Trump. More than $14 billion in aid had been held up due to restrictions on disbursements put in place by Noem last year, but as that backlog gets released, some Democratic-led states are being left out, including California, Illinois, Minnesota and Colorado.
FEMA has denied that the delays are politically motivated.
Still, some Democrats in affected states are convinced that the Trump administration is using disaster aid as a political football. Sen. Alex Padilla of California, a state that is still waiting for more than $1 billion in aid related to the wildfires that devastated parts of Los Angeles last year, issued a statement to that effect. “Donald Trump and his Administration continue to play political games while disaster survivors and local governments are forced to wait for desperately needed federal resources,” Padilla said.
In a statement Thursday, Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, accused Noem of “disastrous mismanagement of FEMA,” adding that “it is absolutely unacceptable that it appears this administration may well be holding up disaster relief to certain blue states.”
What’s next for the DHS shutdown: The White House sent a new proposal for DHS funding late Thursday, but its contents have not yet been made public. Democratic leaders said they are reviewing the proposal closely.
The message from Republicans, though, did not sound particularly conciliatory. “Democrats need to make a move to end the shutdown before more Americans are harmed by a lack of funding for critical services like disaster relief,” a White House official said.
Expectations are low for any progress over the next few days. Noem is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday and the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, and lawmakers will likely focus on the shutdown, even as they remain far apart on finding a way out of it.