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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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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

With Texas still reeling from Hurricane Harvey and another storm barreling toward Florida, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is expected to run out of money by Friday, according to a Senate aide, putting pressure on Congress to provide more funding this week.

As of 10 a.m. Tuesday morning, FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund, which pays for the agency’s disaster response and recovery activity, had just $1.01 billion on hand.

No, I get it. We've set up the system of procedures such that when something like this happens we're not allowed to get mad at or fire anyone. The only lever we have is a binary vote on election year where candidates can say either yes or no to all government spending or none.

I'm reminded of the edit someone made where it says "A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR A MANAGEMENT DECISION, PRETTY COOL HUH?" except it's government budgets.

If I’m reading it correctly, there’s not really anything wrong? FEMA has access to the funds it needs, and if your issue is with the money being spent on immigration related issues, that’s a directive from Congress.