Congress

Congress expects White House disaster aid request next week covering hurricane damage

Published

2 years ago

November 15, 2024

Lawmakers anticipate the Biden administration will send them a disaster aid request next week outlining needed relief following hurricanes Helene and Milton, according to the House’s top two appropriators.

Congressional leaders aim to then finalize and pass a bipartisan assistance package sometime after Thanksgiving that could total more than $100 billion, boosting aid to communities hit by the two hurricanes this fall, as well as a yearslong, nationwide backlog of recovery work for disasters like severe flooding, wildfires and landslides.

House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) and his Democratic counterpart, Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, both said they expect broad bipartisan support for clearing disaster aid in the coming weeks, even as the separate task of funding the government next month is complicated by Blue Light News’s changing balance of power.

Once Congress receives a disaster aid request, it typically takes several weeks for lawmakers to write bill text and pass an emergency funding measure through both chambers. After Hurricane Sandy in 2012, it took exactly three weeks to clear the aid package for the president’s signature once the White House request arrived.

“We want to make sure the estimates are right,” Cole said, using Hurricane Sandy as an example of the “enormously complex” task of calculating recovery costs.

Top lawmakers and congressional aides have already been working behind the scenes this fall to size up funding needs since Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida more than seven weeks ago, including travel to affected communities. Beyond FEMA, dozens of other federal agencies are estimated to need tens of billions of dollars to assist in recovery efforts, including support for massive infrastructure projects like rebuilding water systems in North Carolina, where water remains undrinkable in cities like Asheville.

The goal is to try to clear a disaster package “as quickly as possible,” DeLauro told reporters Friday. “There’s been so many natural disasters and fires,” she added. “People are suffering.”

Since FEMA still has several billion dollars in its disaster relief fund, the basic recovery work the agency supports is unlikely to be significantly delayed if Congress clears an assistance package in December. But the Small Business Administration has been out of money for a month to cover loans to homeowners and businesses in disaster-wrought communities.

Lawmakers from states struck by the hurricanes are trying to fast-track a bill that would refill the disaster loan program now, rather than wait weeks for lawmakers to turn the White House’s broader aid request into law. But Sen. Rand Paul blocked a request this week to quickly pass a bill to that end, as the Kentucky Republican insists the Senate cover the cost by clawing back other unrelated funding.

“I’m willing to let the bill pass,” Paul said on the floor. “But take some of the fluff and boondoggle subsidies from the Green New Deal and put it into here.”

This week, the Small Business Administration told appropriators that more than 10,000 applications for disaster loans are already on pause, and that number is growing by the day. People awaiting loans to make their homes livable or keep their restaurants from going bankrupt are now hearing by phone or email from the agency that the program is out of cash and awaiting action from Congress.

Passing disaster aid is when lawmakers “cut the crap and do our jobs,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said this week before Paul blocked his request to pass a bill to fund the disaster loan program.

“A lot of these people lost loved ones who owned businesses,” Tillis said. “Now they’re just trying to keep their business afloat while they’re going to funerals. And we tell them: ‘Well, we’ve just got to wait for Congress before we can send you a check?’ Because for the first time in this body, we’re going to demand a pay-for for disaster recovery?”

Congress

Republicans just took ICE spending fights off the table. It won’t end shutdown threats.

Published

56 minutes ago

June 10, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Republicans just solved an immediate crisis with a party-line vote to fund immigration enforcement agencies into 2029. But that hardly improves the chances of avoiding a shutdown for the rest of the government.

Lawmakers in both parties say the odds of another federal funding lapse are unimproved, if not heightened, by the GOP’s move to fund President Donald Trump’s immigration and border security efforts for three years through the party-line budget reconciliation process.

The Sept. 30 government shutdown deadline, less than four months away, hits just weeks before the November elections that will determine which party controls the House and Senate next year. This electoral uncertainty was already complicating cross-party negotiations to fund federal agencies.

“It’s not helpful for sure,” Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the Senate’s top Democratic appropriator, told reporters this week of the GOP’s party-line gambit. “It makes it very difficult for us moving forward.”

The Senate’s top appropriators, who are typically chummy, are at loggerheads over totals for the military and nondefense programs — prompting the cancellation this week of committee markups for the second week in a row.

Republicans’ move to stiff-arm Democrats has further soured negotiations to fund the government and raised concerns of more my-way-or-the-highway ultimatums from members on both sides.

“Does it mean that we avoid a shutdown in that area? Takes care of that,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), a senior appropriator, said about removing the need to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol past the end of President Donald Trump’s term.

“But how many other accounts do we have that we could have another kerfuffle?” she continued. “And all of a sudden we now have leverage, because we tried it once — and we pulled the trigger.”

Murkowski voted against the reconciliation bill last week — the only Senate Republican to do so.

It’s widely accepted on Capitol Hill that Congress will pass a stopgap funding bill to keep cash flowing for federal agencies past the midterms.

Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), who oversees annual transportation and housing spending, predicted this week that Congress will be crafting a funding patch come September. “I just hope we’re not seriously talking about a potential shutdown again,” he added. “We touched that stove once. It was pretty hot.”

Yet some are predicting Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer will direct his members to band together to oppose a funding patch, as Democrats did last September in triggering a 43-day government shutdown.

“They do not want appropriation bills. They do want to shut down government,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told reporters about Democrats. “And they think they’re going to take the House and maybe the Senate and can get a better deal then.”

Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins said Democrats “have made clear they are not willing to work with us” to pass government funding bills. But the Maine Republican also said she doesn’t think her party’s move to fund immigration enforcement through reconciliation “has an effect one way or another” on funding the rest of the government beyond September.

Though ICE and Border Patrol are now funded through September 2029, some Democrats say they are planning to use the dozen annual government funding bills as leverage to demand policy changes and funding cuts at those two agencies.

“I can tell you this: We’re going to try every which way to unfund these agencies,” Rep. Lois Frankel (D-Fla.), a member of the Appropriations Committee. “We have 12 bills that we have to pass. We have so many battles — this piece is one of them.”

Democrats had for months been demanding guardrails on Trump’s immigration enforcement activities as a condition of supporting enforcement funding after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minnesota in January. When talks broke down, Republicans made the decision to act alone.

It’s not just ICE and Border Patrol that control immigration enforcement policy, though. Congress still has to fund the broader operations of DHS each year, including the office of Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who recently told lawmakers he couldn’t commit to following court orders.

“You still have to ultimately deal with the Homeland Security bills, and they’ve refused to rein in a lawless ICE operation,” Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a top Democratic appropriator, said in an interview. “That’s not changed.”

Some appropriators are holding out hope that collegiality on the House and Senate funding panels will ultimately prevail, if for no other reason than the margins of the Republican majorities in both chambers depend on it.

“You don’t have to have a master’s in logic to figure out that, at the end of the process, the bills in today’s Congress are going to have a bipartisan flavor,” Womack said, “because the numbers dictate that anybody that thinks otherwise is just simply not being intellectually honest about the situation that we happen to be in.”

After Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) proposed the idea this week of funding other controversial agencies through party-line reconciliation bills, House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole immediately rejected the idea floated by one of his subcommittee chairs.

“We’re not doing that. I will just tell you flat out, that will not happen,” the Oklahoma Republican told reporters.

He also refuted the idea that the $70 billion party-line immigration enforcement package could be attractive for his colleagues to replicate going forward.

“I don’t think it’s a precedent,” Cole said. “But if it became a regular practice, I certainly wouldn’t be supporting it.”

Congress

Trump-backed Marty O’Donnell wins primary for battleground Nevada House seat

Published

6 hours ago

June 10, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Trump-endorsed Marty O’Donnell won the GOP primary Tuesday to take on Democratic Rep. Susie Lee in Nevada’s battleground 3rd District.

The seat, which touches parts of Las Vegas, is one of Republicans’ targeted pickups this November since President Donald Trump carried it by less than 1 percentage point in 2024 after losing it by nearly seven points in 2020.

But O’Donnell — who also has the backing of the National Republican Congressional Committee — will face an uphill battle. He recently came under fire for hosting a neo-Nazi influencer on his podcast. Trump’s tariffs have hit the district hard, with Canadian tourism to Sin City down by 17 percent, leaving Democrats confident they can hold the seat.

O’Donnell is best known for his role as the audio composer for the “Halo” video game series. It’s his second run in the district after placing fourth in the 2024 Republican primary.

O’Donnell bested several candidates Tuesday, with businessperson Tera Anderson and former Ambassador to Iceland Jeff Gunter — who ran for Senate in 2024 — putting up the most significant challenges.

Congress

Sen. Lindsey Graham wins primary over ‘America First’ challenger

Published

8 hours ago

June 10, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham is on his way to clinching his fifth term in the Senate.

Graham won the Republican primary for Senate on Tuesday, vanquishing five opponents that included businessperson Mark Lynch — who challenged the senator over his staunch support for the war in Iran and long history in Washington. Lynch also drew support from some of the president’s most prominent MAGA Republican critics.

But Graham won more than half the primary vote, allowing him to avoid an embarrassing two-week runoff sprint. He is expected to cruise to victory in November; a Democrat has not represented the state in the Senate since 2005, when longtime Sen. Fritz Hollings chose not to seek reelection.

The four-term senator spent big in the final weeks of the campaign to make sure he won, combining with his allies to spend over $18 million in television and digital ads touting his record and endorsement from President Donald Trump. That spending proved to be decisive in staving off Lynch’s challenge from the right.

He even called in the big guns for a last minute bump, bringing in Trump, who reaffirmed his support for his occasional frenemy in a telerally on the eve of the primary election.

Graham’s success is a loss for the strict “America First” wing of the GOP that has criticized the president’s new interventionist foreign policy streak, including former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and former counterterrorism official Joe Kent. They came out in support of Lynch during the final stretch of the campaign, though that was not enough to upset Graham, a fixture of Columbia and Washington politics.