Heritage’s Jim Carafano appeared on CBS’s “Early Show” to discuss the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) wanting a blank check. FEMA says it has too little money in the Disaster Relief Fund (DRF) due to its federalizing a record number of natural disasters this year. (Watch the video here.)
As Carafano notes, FEMA needs to save its resources—funding especially—for truly catastrophic events, and get out of the business of bailing out states for natural disasters that occur with fairly predictable regularity. This issue of federalization of disasters is vividly illustrated by this chart and discussed in our latest report, “Homeland Security 4.0: Overcoming Centralization, Complacency, and Politics.” As previously discussed, Representative Eric Cantor (R–VA) is spot on to demand spending cuts elsewhere before beefing up FEMA’s DRF.
