Big Government to the Rescue

There are still libertarians after a hurricane. We just shouldn't listen to them.

U.S. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Trinity Bierley, 107th MPAD, FLARNG

After Hurricane Helene tore its way through parts of the Southeast, Donald Trump hustled to Georgia to be photographed amid the devastation. Standing there in his red Make America Great Again hat, he said that Kamala Harris was “out somewhere campaigning,” unlike him — the man who threw paper towels at survivors of Hurricane Maria, then blocked disaster funds from reaching them. Not having met his quota of lies for the day, he also claimed Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp couldn’t get President Biden on the phone, when in fact not only had Biden and Kemp spoken earlier that day, he and the other Republican governors whose states were affected had praised the Biden administration’s responsiveness. 

But this is not just a story about Donald Trump being cynical and dishonest. It’s also about the eternal argument about the size of government, and the very real and specific ways that people’s lives are affected when conservative philosophy is put into practice. 

It’s certainly maddening to watch Republican politicians and Fox News halfwits lie about a supposedly insufficient federal response to Helene. But there’s something deeper at work. You’ve heard the expression “There are no atheists in foxholes,” the idea that even those who don’t believe in a god will plead for divine help when their lives are threatened. It’s not actually true. If you’re tempted to say by analogy that there are no libertarians after a hurricane, well that’s not true either.

This is hardly the first time we’ve seen this variant of opportunistic hypocrisy, in which Republicans who would starve emergency agencies of sufficient funding turn around and attack a Democratic administration for an allegedly insufficient response to an emergency. And in fact, just days ago, Republicans had the opportunity to bolster FEMA’s budget; you’ll never guess what many of them chose to do.

Help should go only to the deserving, i.e. me and mine

When there’s an emergency, many Republicans will first decide whether they like the people who are being most affected, and only then determine whether they want to help them. For instance, when Congress was debating how to aid the victims of Hurricane Sandy (which hit the Northeast hardest) Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio took out their green eyeshades and determined that the bills being proposed were just too generous, but when a hurricane hits Florida, they want to pull out all the federal stops to make Floridians whole. The same was true of Ted Cruz and other Republicans from Texas: They opposed relief for Sandy, but came asking for taxpayers around the country to help their state recover from Hurricane Harvey.

Which those taxpayers, and the Democrats who represent them, were happy to provide. We see this kind of approach to government in other areas as well: Republicans like JD Vance condemn and vote against laws like the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill, then demand money through those laws for their own states and districts. Like nearly every Republican, Vance is okay with the federal government promoting economic development if there’s something in it for him, namely that he can tell his constituents that he helped them and thereby bolster his own political position. But he couldn’t care less if people in Georgia or Maine or Texas or Colorado get the same help.

And Trump now claims that “the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor of [North Carolina are] going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas. MAGA!” Which is not just a lie but a confession: It’s what he would do, and did do as president, so surely it must be what Biden is doing.

The government we expect

At moments like this, people have extremely high expectations of government. I don’t blame them for this; all I wish is that before disaster hits we had those expectations in mind so we could build the kind of government that can meet them. 

Let me point you to this interview on NBC News with a woman talking about a loved one stranded in Spruce Pine, NC, a small mountain town 50 miles from Asheville, with whom she has lost contact. She notes that “the only way out is to be airlifted,” and says that while so much focus is on Asheville, when it comes to the more remote areas, “FEMA is not on the ground there at all. They are not in these cities, not in these towns, and not in these villages.” She goes on to say that in that area, roads are inaccessible because of mudslides and trees that have come down. 

So let’s be clear then — and I’m not saying this to minimize this woman’s distress, which is real and understandable. But if what we want is an emergency agency that in a disaster like this will be able to immediately reach every last affected town and area, even when roads are out, then we’re talking about a different system than the one we have now. 

If it’s possible at all, it would require a budget and level of personnel many times what FEMA and state agencies have at their disposal. Do we want to multiply the FEMA budget and manpower by 5 or 10 times? Okay, let’s do that. As it works now, FEMA has a regular budget that, apart from its Disaster Relief Fund and flood insurance program, runs to about $5 billion a year. When there are large disasters, Congress will pass supplemental funding for the DRF, often in the tens of billions of dollars. Do we want to just put $100 billion into FEMA every year in preparation, and increase its head count from its current 20,000 to, say, 100,000? We could do that if we wanted. But we don’t. 

And in case you haven’t heard, Project 2025 — which despite Trump’s denials absolutely will be the blueprint for his next administration — proposes drastic cuts to FEMA’s budget and the elimination of the flood insurance program (good luck getting flood insurance from private insurers). 

Let me point out one more story entitled “In the wake of Hurricane Helene, questions about government response emerge.” It includes these comments from a county official:

“We requested water even before the storm started — because we knew that — not that it was going to fail — but we were asking for water so that people could have extra,” Pinder said. “We were asking for food, we were asking for anything, because we felt some people were going to be cut off because of how much rain was coming.”

Such requests go to the state, which works with FEMA to address them, Pinder said. Despite the advance requests, Pinder said, Buncombe County received its first shipment of water at 2:30 a.m. Monday.

Asked whether the county had its own reserves of water for such emergencies, Pinder acknowledged it didn’t. 

“We do not have a county stockpile,” she said. The county relies on contractors for water reserves, she added, but she said it couldn’t immediately access water from its primary local provider that it typically relies on during emergencies because “the Swannanoa River kind of made them isolated to us and we could not get to that stockpile.”

The lesson here is that as heroic as government officials often are in these situations, preparing for emergencies that can take an unpredictable course is difficult and costly. And then when the disaster hits, everyone wants help right away, because people are suffering and desperate. 

There will never be a perfect government response to a disaster of this magnitude. But even as people and local businesses chip in to help one another (as they always do), only the government can do it at the necessary scale. So if we want it to do it right, we have give it the resources it needs beforehand. And the people yapping about “small government” are going to be no help at all.