MSNBC "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell" - Transcript: Interview with Sen. Jeff Merkley

Interview

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O`DONNELL: With the terrifying hurricane bearing down on the Carolinas at  a time when FEMA needs all the resources it can get, our next guest,  Senator Jeff Merkley, has revealed on Rachel Maddow`s show last night that  the Trump administration has been shifting resources away from FEMA within  the Homeland Security Department to support the policy of separating  families at our southern border where 416 children remain separated from  their parents.

Hurricane Florence is expected to possibly make landfall in North and South  Carolina some time early on Friday. Federal, state and local officials are  working together to coordinate what is now the largest peacetime evacuation  in U.S. history.

Joining us now is Senator Jeff Merkley, Democratic senator from Oregon,  who`s on the Foreign Relations Committee.

Senator Merkley, we`ve heard some response today from FEMA, from the Trump  administration saying the resources that you`re talking about, the movement  of that money, won`t have any effect on the hurricane response. What is  your reaction to that?

SEN. JEFF MERKLEY (D), OREGON: Well, it`s striking that they can take $10  million away and say it has no impact. Certainly, what we have seen, if  you can take this money and preposition supplies, if you can have more  communications equipment, if you can have more boats ready to assist in the  aftermath of the flooding, in every possible way $10 million makes a  difference.

And in the first month of the hurricane season to take those funds and  basically take those funds away in order to build prison camps, that`s --  that`s certainly not a -- not the best use as we face the storms that a  near miss in Hawaii, a major tropical storm hitting Mississippi, now a  category 3 hurricane bearing down on the Carolinas. You want every  possible way for FEMA to do its job, save lives, save structures, support  the American people when disaster looms.

O`DONNELL: And a former FEMA official just appeared on Rachel`s show in  the last hour and she was confirming exactly what you`re saying about this.  That that`s real money leaving FEMA. That is money they do in fact need on  a daily basis to stay prepared and to be ready for these kinds of events.
But this is one of the problems of the Homeland Security Department, it  took some operation that were out there in the government including the  Coast Guard and put them inside homeland security, so that that money can  now move from something like the Coast Guard where we have reports that  they`re moving money out of that. Also and since the security issues are  also in that department, that`s where they could end up using the money.
MERKLEY: Yes, it moves some $200 million, including actually taking away  some funding from the border wall, which I found absolutely fascinating.

But in this issue regarding FEMA, here`s what happened last year. FEMA  didn`t do the best possible job in Texas. They did a horrific job in  Puerto Rico. They did a terrible job in the Virgin Islands.

And what we`d like to hear from them is after those storms, we did a  thorough evaluation. These are all things we can do better.

We don`t want to have a situation where like we had in Puerto Rico, nine  months later, there were thousands of homes covered in blue tarps because people hadn`t gotten funds to repair their roofs. There were hospitals 
completely knocked out of action or almost completely knocked out of action. You had thousands of families that didn`t have power, electric power.

And that was the sort of response and recovery that you would expect in a  developing country, a very poor country, not in the United States of  America. So did they take those experiences and say here`s how we can  improve our operations in a massive way so that if storms strike in 2018,  we`ll do a far better job? And so far, there`s no evidence that they have  taken that as their mission.

O`DONNELL: And, Senator Merkley, isn`t one of the big differences in what  we`re going to see this week in the Carolinas and what we saw in Puerto  Rico is Puerto Rico has no electoral votes and that the Carolinas have the  electoral votes that President Trump wants?

MERKLEY: Well, that is a great point because I came back from that trip  thinking if Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands had a vote in the U.S.  Senate they would have recovered because they would have gotten the  resources to recover three or four times faster. And that`s -- that`s  something we should all ponder, that these folks are being neglected in  particular.

But let me just mention there are still folks down in the Houston area who  feel they haven`t gotten the service that they need to recover either.

O`DONNELL: And, Senator, when we get through this hurricane as we surely  will, will there be any attempt by Congress to oversee exactly how our  hurricane response has been working?

MERKLEY: We just did not see the hearings under Republican control of the  House and Senate to really get to the bottom of what went wrong last year,  and suspect they will try not to shine a light on what goes wrong this  year. I think we`ll only see those hearings if Democrats take the House  and the Senate. In that case, I think you`ll see an honest effort to look  into what went wrong and say we can do better.

And we, Congress, in a bipartisan way stand ready to help. Is it  resources? Is it flexibility? Is it design of the programs?

Let`s work together to do the best possible job for the American people.

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