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Jeroboam and you both seems unfamiliar with governmental budgetary practices. The order of money allocation does alleviate a falsely accused injustice because the order of money allocation renders the charge baseless.
FEMA cannot be swindled out of $300 million if FEMA never had $300 million that could be allocated for other purposes. If the money is only appropriated to FEMA for the purpose of migrant support, it'd be more accurate to say FEMA received $300 million more than it otherwise would have with the potential for ancillary benefits of dual-utilization investments that would be absent Congress had chosen another agency to help disperse the appropriated funds. Since American budgets work more along the lines of Purpose -> Funds -> Agency rather than Agency -> Funds -> Purpose, it is wrong to claim spending on one cause stole from another, even by the same agency, unless those are specifically the same funding line.
Since gaining $300 million you otherwise wouldn't have but for the action has considerably different moral and ethical implications than losing $300 million you could have used but for the action, this would if anything be the opposite of a swindle.
This is the distinction between an appropriation and an allocation.
How much money does the Federal Emergency Management Agency need to be allocated before it starts having some left over with which to manage federal emergencies?
It was specifically the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund that was down to only $1 billion dollars on hand until they asked Congress for more money and so Congress passed a bill providing an additional $20 billion at the end of last month. The FEMA Shelter and Services program spending money on migrants ($650 million in 2024) was never part of that, and no amount of money provided to something that isn't to FEMA Disaster Relief is going to overflow and provide money to FEMA Disaster Relief. Both are under FEMA but there's not some unified pool of FEMA funds, you might as well blame NASA.
There's "FEMA disaster relief is about to run out of money!" headlines whenever there's a bad hurricane year, because Congress provides it additional funds as needed rather than providing that much funding every year. Here's an article from 2017:
Bloomberg: FEMA Is Almost Out of Money and Hurricane Irma Is Approaching
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How much water needs to be poured into a bowl before the bowl starts having some water left over to be in the bowl?
Unless you intend to claim that FEMA was not appropriated money with which to manage federal emergencies, the question doesn't parse. Governmental budgets tend to work on a 'pot of money' model, in which your annual appropriation is the starting amount you have to work with. Other pots (funding codes) don't get filled to overflowing for you to get the remainder- your pot is separate from others pots (funding codes) from the start.
Competition for resources at an Agency or Ministry level generally happens within a funding code, not between funding codes. Every disaster draws from the 'manage federal emergencies' pot of money. No emergency draws from the 'facility maintenance and improvement' pot of money. When cross-pot funding gets involved, so do lawyers, because if you start allocating funds for uses they weren't appropriate for by the government, you're defrauding your own government and the audits tend not to be pleasant.
When a funding code's allocation is proving insufficient for the year, this is a normal point for legislatures to pass additional appropriations. This is generally still on the per-pot basis, and from what I've read is more or less what was already underway with FEMA.
What I'm asking is how much money do we need to shovel into this organization before it starts having enough left over after migrant expenses for hurricane response. The money we're allocating now isn't enough for the hurricane budget after other expenses. How much more money do we need to give before there's enough?
The amount of money it costs to cover hurricane costs is the amount of money it costs to cover hurricane costs. No more, and no less.
Again, your question assumes an invalid premise. There is no 'starts having left over after migrant expenses,' because migrant expenses don't come out of the hurricane response budget in the first place.
No, the money you allocated for the hurricane budget in the last appropriation months ago isn't enough for the hurricane budget after hurricane expenses.
Non-hurricane expenses had nothing to do with it, because non-hurricane expenses didn't come out of the hurricane funding code.
X-Y
The amount of money that is enough for all hurricane response expenses incurred the budget period (X), minus the insufficient amount previously budgeted for hurricane response (Y).
You realize that your argument would still apply if we, for example, gave 99.9% of FEMA budget to migrants and basically nothing to actual disaster relief? It is an extremely pedantic argument because you are obscuring that the basic problem is that these federal agencies should be serving the American people facing actual disasters but they are giving money to other people instead. This is so obvious that trying to handwave it with accounting pedantry is ridiculous.
And the argument would still be correct. If you want to spend X amount of money for a purpose, you must appropriate X amount of money for the purpose. If you only appropriated a lesser amount of Y, then you must appropriate the difference to meet the target of X.
If an institution with the power of the purse chooses not to fund something, the money was never in the possession of the non-recipient in the first place. If the power of the purse funds something else, that money was not deceitfully deprived from the alternative recipient- it was never there for them to claim or use in the first place.
I am pleased you are retreating from your latest jewish conspiracy theory to petulantly complain about pedantry after and while making embarrassingly basic mistakes on government budgetary practices.
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The point is that if you're going to be mad at someone it should be congress for allocating money in a dumb way. It makes no sense to get mad at FEMA for not exercising discretion they don't have.
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