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Floor Speech

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Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, exactly 2 years ago today, Vermont was struck with devastating floods. Those floods occurred not only a year ago today, but 2 years ago today. We had back-to-back floods in 2023 and 2024, doing about a billion dollars' worth of damage.

And by the end of last year, every county in Vermont, all 14 counties, were hit by flooding. That billion dollars in damages affected homes; it affected businesses; it affected farms.

We had 6,000 tons of debris that was removed, 77 State bridges and 63 State roads were closed; 704 miles of rail was closed, and 159 miles of rail trail was closed.

We are far from alone in Vermont in having suffered enormous damage from wild weather events. And I see my colleague from Texas, to whom all of us extend our heartfelt sorrow and condolences at the flooding in Texas and the loss of lives of those wonderful Texans and those kids.

This type of wild weather event can hit any one of our States at any time of its own choosing. And all of our States have been affected at one time or another.

Now, I want to talk about FEMA. Our experience in Vermont with FEMA is that it is absolutely essential and actually quite helpful in the immediate aftermath of the weather event.

FEMA can preposition resources. It has the capacity to surge resources and personnel, including people with real experience, and can coordinate with the local response, which is always very intense, from State resources and also from incredible outpouring of help from volunteers.

But acknowledging the importance of FEMA in the immediate aftermath of a wild weather event in any of our States cannot disregard the fact that we need to reform FEMA. We need significant reform in FEMA.

In the aftermath of the floods of 2023 and 2024, I visited all of our communities that were affected, and I followed up after that to talk to our local officials, our local volunteers, our local regional planning commissions: What worked and what didn't in the long-term response?

And what I heard from officials--regardless of what their political orientation was but local officials who had a real sense of urgency about getting the community back on its feet--was that FEMA was too slow; it was too bureaucratic; it was conflicting in the advice and information that it gave. And the ability to respond quickly and timely was really inhibited because of the centralization of the decision- making authority in FEMA in Washington or in one of the regional locations where FEMA has administrative structures. For Vermont that, ironically, is Puerto Rico, which is not only not close to Vermont but doesn't have anything close to the weather in Vermont.

So the aftermath of repairing, getting the community back on its feet--that is where FEMA has failed us. It is because of the centralization, in my view--actually, less important than my view--in the view of the local officials who have ongoing responsibility to get the community back on its feet. They just couldn't get answers.

Let me just give some examples. When there is a culvert out, there is a road out, there is a bridge down, the people whose bridge is affected, the people who are threatened if we have a culvert replaced that is too small for what now we know will be the required carrying capacity of a culvert, the best people to make that are right there in that community. They have a sense of urgency. They have a commitment to the well-being of the people they represent in that community. They have the pressure of local community people watching to see if they are making progress on that recovery.

But what has happened with FEMA, where everything is centralized, is you don't get an answer. Can we replace an 18-inch culvert with a 36- inch culvert? Can we do the bridge over Hartland Road? Or can we make a change because the bridge over Route 5 is more important to get fixed and that is the priority?

One of the problems that our communities had is that the program managers--those are the people assigned by FEMA to serve communities as the bridge between the local community and FEMA--they are changed constantly. So we have had in some of our small towns--and I am talking towns with a population of like 300--they have one program manager after another and over the course of a year and a half might have seven or eight program managers. When that program manager is doing good work and asking questions and they are getting answers from the town clerk, the new program manager comes in, and it is as though nothing ever happened, and they have to start all over again. So it creates an enormous amount of frustration.

We have a situation with the town of Stannard where the town clerk-- this is the town of 300--the town had to make a decision about repaving a road. It is a gravel surface. In order to get repaved more than a year after the road had been repaired, with the town borrowing money it really couldn't afford for a project that clearly was ultimately going to be covered by FEMA, the town clerk was getting questions about, what is the size of the gravel stones in that roadbed 12 inches down? That makes no sense. And what happens, of course, is it creates an immense amount of frustration.

A community that goes through a major weather event, in the shock of it, in the immediate aftermath, everyone rushes in to help. But if it is your farm, if it is your business, if it is your home, you have to live with the effects of a slow-moving, nonresponsive, centralized bureaucracy rather than get on with life and get an answer. Yes or no? Can you do this or not?

So as a result of my discussions with the communities that have been affected in Vermont, today, I have introduced a bill that is called the Disaster Assistance Improvement and Decentralization, AID, Act. Quite simply, what this bill does is it recognizes that if you are going to get as quick a recovery as possible, as efficient a recovery as possible, as cost-effective a recovery as possible, you actually have to delegate responsibility and authority to the local community that has to live with the consequences of the damage that has been done. There has to be a partnership. There has to be accountability.

But where FEMA's role is going to be better on this is on oversight to make sure that there is the proper use of taxpayer, FEMA-authorized money. But it is not going to micromanage local folks to death in the name of oversight; it is going to empower the local folks to make those decisions that have to be made right now about getting that community back on its feet.

Every single one of us is horrified when the people we represent suffer the result of a wild and catastrophic weather event. The loss of life is horrifying. The destruction to the well-being of the community is inconsolable. But we can help by making that long-term recovery process work better, and the only way it is really going to work better is by having much more authority in local hands--the decisions that they can make about the culvert, about the bridge, about the grade of gravel that goes into the repairs.

So my hope is that we can come together as a Congress to fix FEMA so that its capacity to help our communities when they have been hurt so hard through no fault of their own--that they will be able to get the capacity to make decisions, act, and get their community back on its feet.

Now, I do oppose this discussion that we are had hearing to some extent from President Trump and Secretary Noem about abolishing FEMA. You know, we can abolish FEMA when we can get an Executive order abolishing and banning wild weather events, but that day is not going to come. But another storm in one of our communities inevitably will come.

What I want us to do, for your State and mine, is to have a FEMA that can be on hand, prepositioned, and help in the immediate aftermath and then be a partner but where we put the decision making and the capacity to act and the flexibility that is necessary for the wise recovery of our communities in the hands of our local officials. I think this will make a much better recovery process for the folks all of us represent in the great United States of America. ______

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