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Floor Speech

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Mr. WELCH. Madam President, if the 118th Congress were a baseball game, we would be nearing the bottom of the ninth. As every Senator is well aware, our to-do list for the next 2 weeks is long.

There are very important issues we need to resolve before the last vote of the year. We need to keep the government open. We need to extend the farm bill and vote on the NDAA. And critically for Vermont and for so many States around the Nation, we must pass the comprehensive disaster aid package.

Legislating is a team sport. If we work together and find common ground, we can send a bill to the President's desk before the end of Congress and deliver for those communities that desperately, desperately need action from the U.S. Senate.

Despite our differences, whether they are political or geographic, communities from Montpelier, VT, to Mankato, MN; from Houston, TX, to Asheville, NC, to Maui, HI, are all asking for Congress to help with the devastation that has happened in those communities.

For months, bipartisan Members of Congress from States that have been affected by floods, fires, hurricanes, and tornadoes have approached our colleagues in the time of our need. We have asked publicly and privately for the assistance and financial support that our homeowners need, our farmers need, and businesses, towns, and local governments urgently need, because when it comes to these extreme weather events, we all know that if it is not us now, it may be us tomorrow, because there but for the grace of God, go I, when the extreme weather events decide to descend upon any community.

I found in the conversations I have had with my colleagues-- Republican and Democrat--about Vermont's recovery needs, there is an unspoken acknowledgement that they are not in the Vermont situation or in the Asheville, NC, situation, but it could change.

The climate change that we are experiencing all around the country requires that, No. 1, we be ready to respond; two, we be more resilient and prepared; and, three, that we have better funded responses to recovery so that it can be faster, locally driven, and more efficient.

In July of 2023, Vermont experienced torrential rains and severe storms. For a week, the rain didn't stop. That rain quickly led to catastrophic flooding and landslides. Many homes, many of our farms and businesses and communities were absolutely destroyed, and the damage to infrastructure was fierce. Roads, rail lines, dams, bridges, wastewater plants, the capital city's post office, which after 14 months finally reopened, those were destroyed.

Nine States around Vermont came to our aid, and we are grateful. They sent personnel. They sent resources. But a year after that flood, in July-- to the same date in July--we had another round of flooding, and many of those same homes and businesses and farms were impacted.

The last time Congress passed a comprehensive disaster aid package was December of 2022. Since then, we have had more than 50 climate disasters around our country that each caused more than $1 billion in damages--a total of $155 billion in damages and rising. We know that that number is only going to grow when we have the final losses from Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene, and they are continuing to be calculated. This is an environmental and an economic disaster.

These disasters have impacted communities from Vermont to North Carolina, to Minnesota, to Texas and Hawaii, and more than 40 States and Territories total.

As we all know, extreme weather does not discriminate based on State lines or political preferences. In a crisis, we are all neighbors in need.

Since Congress last passed a comprehensive disaster aid bill--this is just to give a sense of how repetitive this is and how what had been an outlier event is now becoming a common event in different places around our country--these are disasters that have happened: Flooding in North Dakota between April and May of 2023. Flooding near West Point and the Hudson Valley area of New York in 2023. Hurricane Helene caused damage across Georgia and South Carolina in September of 2024. Flooding in 2023 in Central California, with enormous damage in the Central Valley. Hurricane Milton slammed Florida in October of 2024. Southeastern Iowa saw devastating tornadoes in 2024. Tornadoes and severe storms hit Nebraska in April and June of this year. And 110 tornadoes ripped across Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Illinois, and Kentucky in May, killing 16. And more than 40 tornadoes caused damage across Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee in March of 2023.

These events are all too common, and they are going to accelerate, not diminish. So we do need to fund FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund, and we need to do that for the benefit of all Americans. We need to provide those farmers and producers and ranchers with dedicated recovery assistance to help them with their losses so they can farm and ranch again. We need to get our communities the flexible funding--and I emphasize ``flexible'' and locally driven funding--that they need through programs like the community development block grant disaster recovery funding, something that Senator Schatz from Hawaii has been leading on.

We need to rebuild our infrastructure. We have to reimburse our States, whose budgets have been hammered, and reimburse our communities that have spent big to get folks back on safe roads. We need to fix our wastewater and drinking water systems for the health and well-being of our citizens. And we have to help those small businesses.

That aid has to come sooner rather than later. The delay has already been really brutal on their ability to keep the lights on. The longer we wait to help disaster victims, the more disaster victims we will have. The list of needs will only grow. Delay hurts. It doesn't help.

That is why I am asking my colleagues in the Senate and in the House to act now and act quickly for Vermont and for every State hit by a disaster since we last passed a disaster bill so many storms ago. We cannot wait.

As I said, we have common ground in our common crisis. We must send a disaster bill to President Biden's desk.

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