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Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHATZ. Madam President, we are running out of time. We have just over a week left before Congress goes home for the holidays, and we cannot leave town without passing long-term disaster relief.

People have waited and waited and waited and waited for help to arrive, and every day that we don't get this done is another day that survivors can't start to get back to life as they knew it--going to work, going to school, dropping their kids off at basketball practice, getting together with friends and neighbors.

For the people in Lahaina, help cannot come soon enough. Almost a year and a half after the tragic fires, it is as hard as ever to make ends meet. Housing is scarce. Prices are going up. Jobs are hard to come by. People are doing everything they can to get by and to help each other out. So it is not for a lack of trying; it is that they were never meant to confront this recovery alone.

When you have lost everything, when you are still mourning friends and loved ones, when you are 16 months into a recovery and normalcy still feels so far away, you need help, and getting that help is the difference between people being able to stay on Maui or leaving. People are leaving the only place they have ever called home. Those are the stakes. They are not theoretical. This is happening to hundreds of families in West Maui.

Lahaina is not the only community that has been devastated by a disaster. Communities in 40 States are building back from a disaster of some kind--a flood, a wildfire, a hurricane--and more than 25 States are relying on long-term Federal assistance to get survivors back on their feet. No one is asking for charity. What they are asking for is the kind of aid that has helped to restore so many communities across the country over many, many years. This is what Congress is supposed to do--Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, New York and New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy, Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, California after the 2018 wildfires, and more than a dozen States nationally as recently as 3 years ago.

The Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program-- known as CDBG-DR--works. It has supported millions of Americans struck by disaster over the last 30 years by giving them flexible, long-term assistance. So to fail to do this now for people in Lahaina and across the country would be quite unusual and shameful.

We have a simple task here: to help our fellow Americans in their hour of need. I want to be perfectly clear. We cannot and we will not leave town without passing disaster aid.

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