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Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, Congress has one task over the next 2 weeks, and it is relatively straightforward: to keep the government open and avoid a pointless and costly shutdown that would hurt most Americans. And as we do that, there is one priority that we can't afford to neglect or punt, and that is providing disaster aid to communities across the country that are still waiting.
All across our country, in more than 20 States and territories, millions of Americans are reeling from disasters: wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, floods. And having lost their homes, their communities, their livelihoods, they count on the Federal Government to help.
For people on Maui, help is needed immediately. More than a year after the deadly fires that leveled an entire town, claimed 102 lives, and stole just about everything from those lucky enough to survive, nothing is normal yet. Survivors in temporary housing are being forced to move every few months. Many have moved five times in the last year, shattering any semblance of stability that they have been able to cobble together. Meanwhile, not a single home has been rebuilt so far. Not a single home has been rebuilt so far. That is a dire emergency for any community in any scenario, but it is especially worrying given that temporary housing assistance from FEMA is due to expire in 5 months.
The long and difficult recovery is squeezing survivors in other ways as well. With fewer jobs and smaller paychecks, people are having to figure out whether they can afford the most basic necessities. A recent poll of Maui wildfire victims found that 70 percent of survivors are cutting back on food and groceries--70 percent cutting back on food in the United States of America--and more than half are cutting back on medicine and other healthcare expenses.
So it is no surprise that people whose families have lived on Maui for generations are considering giving up and leaving the island altogether. And worse, thousands more are on the cusp of doing the same. For Lahaina to fully recover, it needs its people. For Lahaina to recover, it needs its people. And what those people need right now is tangible help--help with building a home, with finding a job, help with rebuilding their small businesses--the kind of help that will finally provide a reprieve from the constant worrying about what is next and hope that a better future awaits them after months of unimaginable suffering.
Providing that kind of help and relief to our fellow Americans in their hour of need is central to the promise of the Federal Government. There are not that many things that the Federal Government absolutely must do. There are not that many things that the Federal Government absolutely must do, but one of them is, when there is a disaster and a State or a county or an island or a reservation or a town is devastated by a natural disaster and the impact of that natural disaster exceeds the ability for that local unit of government to handle it, the President declares a disaster. And then FEMA comes in.
After that, HUD comes in with the support of the Congress through a program called Community Development Block Grants-Disaster Recovery. What does that mean? It is flexible funding for those communities to rebuild. FEMA came to the table and did the disaster response. Now we have to recover. People are not recovered. People are not recovered.
So we have an opportunity not to do something extraordinary but to do something absolutely essential. We have an opportunity not to pass the Civil Rights Act but to do the thing that Congress always does, do the thing that Congress always does, which is, when a community gets flattened, we are there.
Now, the good news is that even though the House proposal for a continuing resolution sort of fell flat on its face for other reasons-- because it was 6 months and because it had this other nonsense in it-- it did have $10 billion for disaster recovery. Now, that was a very narrow program called the Disaster Relief Fund, which absolutely needs those dollars, but the Republican House position is to fund disaster relief in the continuing resolution. We have got the chair and the ranking member in the U.S. Senate and the chair and the ranking member in the U.S. House of the Appropriations Committee saying they want to do disaster relief. We are not fighting about this as a partisan issue. We are not fighting about this as a partisan issue.
So we have an opportunity, again, not to do something unusual but to do the thing that we have always done. What would be unusual is to keep communities waiting for years now--years now. Wildfires in New Mexico. Unfortunately, there are some wildfires in Nevada as we speak. Twenty States waiting on help: Mississippi, Texas, Florida. All over the country, these communities need help.
A lot of stuff we do is really hard. A lot of stuff we do is really partisan. This is neither of those things. We just have to decide that among the things that the Federal Government does is that we come to the table for any American when a disaster hits. Let's get this done.
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