Florida lawmakers in awkward position of having voted against disaster relief, but wanting more of it now.
The earliest estimates suggest the latest storm, Hurricane Milton, may have unleashed roughly $50 billion in damage across Florida, destroying countless homes, businesses and critical infrastructure that will need to be repaired or replaced, probably with the help of urgently needed federal aid.
But Milton is only the most recent extreme weather event in a nation that experiences on average a billion-dollar climate disaster roughly every three weeks, according to some federal estimates. As these storms, droughts, wildfires and floods strike with greater frequency and intensity, the work to rebuild after them has grown more expensive, too. That has exacerbated the many financial strains on the federal government at a time when the national debt exceeds $35 trillion.
“I think the cost of climate [change] is increasingly a threat to our already very fragile fiscal outlook,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. Factoring in the prospect that the government must spend “tens of billions or hundreds of billions more each year to help mitigate the fallout of climate events,” he added, “the outlook looks even darker.”
“It’s one more reason to be nervous about our fiscal future unless we make some changes,” Zandi said.
The nation’s souring fiscal health is the result of many factors, including increased spending, a rapidly aging population and inadequate tax revenue, especially after the tax cuts adopted under Donald Trump’s administration. Generally, budget experts agree that climate change threatens to add to these woes, harming economic output while forcing the government to spend more, and generate less, as it grapples with the consequences of dangerous emissions.
Its disaster relief fund, which allows FEMA to finance immediate response and assist local communities with recovery costs, soared to more than $41 billion in fiscal 2023, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. The last four years marked the four most expensive for the program, which FEMA also tapped over that period to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.
The figure tells an incomplete story, because FEMA is one of more than a dozen federal agencies that aid in a disaster, and it often supplies funds to the hardest-hit communities for many years. W. Craig Fugate, who ran the agency under President Barack Obama from May 2009 to January 2017, said he was still approving aid related to Hurricane Katrina in his final year on the job — 11 years after the deadly storm.
“These disasters have very long tails,” he said, acknowledging that the arrival of longer, more intense hurricane seasons is “adding all of this new work to the pile.”
The increases in FEMA spending align with the grim predictions from other federal agencies and watchdogs, whose warnings are laid bare in years of oft-overlooked reports that hint at the ways in which extreme weather could worsen the federal debt.
Let’s be perfectly clear: Cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations actually pays for itself because reasons, very complicated and magical reasons that made sense when the lobbyists and donors explained them to me.