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Floor Speech
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Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I would like to speak about the importance of FEMA, the importance of fixing it but not destroying it. Mother Nature, this week, provided yet another reminder of the devastating impacts of natural disasters.
In Kentucky, we had catastrophic flooding that inundated communities and led to thousands of evacuations. At least 14 are dead, and all of us, our hearts break for the people of eastern Kentucky. To my colleagues from the Commonwealth, I offer all of my support in getting the aid that you need to help recover.
That is the same commitment I have offered to our colleagues in Hawaii, North Carolina, California, and Florida, and it is also the commitment many of my colleagues made to me and Senator Sanders after Vermont's devastating floods in July of 2023 and 2024.
What we know in Vermont is the disasters that have afflicted us all over the country, they don't care whom you voted for. They don't respect county or State lines. They are indiscriminate and unpredictable, and the storm metes out its suffering in a bipartisan way. There is no escaping it, but we need FEMA. That is what we learned in Vermont.
When the storm arrived, FEMA was there. In the immediate aftermath when people had seen literally their homes swept down a river, when the crops and farms had been destroyed, when businesses were ruined, FEMA was there to help in the immediate aftermath.
But we also experienced something that I have heard from my colleagues in FEMA-related situations, and that is that in the longer term recovery, you run into the frustration of a distant bureaucracy that can't make quick turnaround decisions and such things as granular as whether you can install a 24-inch culvert instead of a 16-inch culvert.
That is why the reform we need is focused on empowering local communities to have much more decision-making and implementation authority in executing the recovery that takes, oftentimes, well over a year or 2 years.
You simply can't have that done by folks not in the community. Those folks in the community are totally invested in getting their community back on its feet, helping its businesses, helping the folks who lost their homes, and helping the farmers who lost their crops.
So the reform that we need in FEMA is definitely there, and we can do that and must do it together because any of these natural disasters are going to come our way at some point, regardless of which side of the aisle you represent.
It is one of the reasons I am absolutely so concerned about what is happening at FEMA now. There has been a DOGE invasion. I use that explicitly. What does Elon Musk know about the suffering in these communities? Where does he get the authority--where does he get the callousness to say FEMA should be destroyed? Something, by the way, the President himself has said.
When I think about all the folks in Vermont, all the folks now in Kentucky, all the folks in California from the fires, Hawaii and the fires, to be told that the response of the Federal Government, when a catastrophic event happened in their community, without any responsibility on their part--they were on the receiving end of Mother Nature making its decision to hit that community at that time. Why do Trump and Musk say we ought to get rid of the Agency that is on the scene as the storm arises and stays there, hopefully, until people get back on their feet?
The other thing that is happening with DOGE going into FEMA is that they are getting access and accumulating very personal information. If you are in the path of the storm and you seek FEMA aid, you have to give a significant amount of your own personal information, but that is solely for the purpose of evaluating your claim.
We now have the DOGE folks. These are very young people. We don't know what their credentials are. We don't know what the use is that they are going to put this information to--getting the personal information of people in all of these communities around the country. They have no right to do that. They have no need to do that. It doesn't facilitate the reform or the destruction of FEMA. It is just an invasion of privacy.
We need FEMA. We can fix it. We can reform it, but I have talked to many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, and they know that most of our States, really all of our States, are simply not set up and equipped to deal with a catastrophic event. Oftentimes, as in the case of Vermont, a once-in-a-100-year-storm that came 2 years in a row, but we don't have the infrastructure of an emergency response to deal with that.
We need the help of the Federal Government. That is exactly the role the Federal Government should play. It has a fiscal capacity that none of our States have, and the definition of an emergency is something that couldn't have been prevented by the actions of the State.
So we need to recommit ourselves to assuring the American people in each of our communities that if and when there is a disaster, FEMA will be there. But we also have an obligation to make it work better so in that long-term recovery that is so essential, both emotionally and physically, that we will give the local communities much more authority to make their decisions and empower them with much more control of the funds needed to meet that recovery as quickly as possible.
We not only can work together to improve FEMA, the only way we will is if we do work together. How in the world is it a partisan issue when you are talking about the folks you represent or I represent who find themselves in the path of a fire, in the path of a flood, in the path of a hurricane or a tornado? We come together to help each other when that happens.
That is the responsibility we have, but more than that, it is really a wonderful opportunity to serve, where we are in a position to help Americans, regardless of where they live, regardless of what their political persuasion is, but because we respect them, the lives they have built, and we want to help them after a destruction of things that are really important to them and their community. We want to help them get back on their feet.
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