News Anchor (3:25)

My double wide mobile home was located right here.

Disaster Survivor (3:30)

68 days ago, a deadly tornado in Tyler Town, Mississippi, leveled Dorothy Yarborough's home. Riding out a tornado in a double wide seems like a very scary experience.

Babbel Representative (3:41)

It was. It was.

News Anchor (3:42)

It happened so fast.

Disaster Survivor (3:44)

But the response from the federal disaster agency, fema, has been slow. Typically, when a tornado destroys a town, someone like Yarborough applies for federal assistance. The president. President signs the declaration, and FEMA spends money to recover and rebuild. Garborough has applied, but after 10 weeks, she's got nothing but a huge pile of debris and this camper. So this was donated by a church. This wasn't FEMA, right?

News Anchor (4:10)

Right. No, no, no. Not FEMA.

Disaster Survivor (4:12)

Across the country, governors have 21 requests into the White House for emergency or disaster declarations. Two have been denied. The other 19, including Mississippi, are waiting for a decision. President Trump says he wants to get rid of FEMA altogether.

News Anchor (4:29)

Somebody's gonna have to help.

Disaster Survivor (4:31)

Patsy Pittman's family has owned this property for generations. She and her husband repaired their damaged home and farm buildings with their own personal insurance money and most of their life savings. 40 grand.

News Anchor (4:43)

We've applied and that's the last we've heard, but they say the president hasn't signed it. So how does that make you feel? A little disappointing. If we can send missiles overseas, why can't we send money to help?

Political Commentator (5:01)

We're also seeing headlines like this, Trump undermined Biden's FEMA in North Carolina. Now the cleaning. Now the cleanup is lagging under Trump's watch. After Trump spread all of these lies about what FEMA was doing in North Carolina and saying that they were prioritizing immigrants over people, which was false. And we're seeing this play out across the country. Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders can't get much more Trumper than that. She was getting her aid delayed. Let's bring in Democratic Congressmember Jared Moskowitz, who led emergency management in Florida before becoming a member of Congress. This is an issue near and dear to your heart, and you're out there raising these calls each and every day. First, talk to us about what's happening, how big of a disaster this is. What are you doing, Congressman?

Congressmember Jared Moskowitz (5:49)

No, first of all, Ben, thanks for talking about this. This is a big deal, especially as we're getting into hurricane season. I mean, literally, we're at the end of May. And let me start at the beginning. Okay? The president was right that FEMA needed reform. He was right about that. The emergency management industry has known FEMA's needed reforms. One of those reforms is that you got to get FEMA out of Homeland Security. Homeland has bastardized fema. They have used FEMA in ways that FEMA was not built for. And they turned FEMA into the grant agency for every other department in Homeland Homeland, which got FEMA off its core mission of response and recovery. And that's been well known. You talk to former administrators of fema, Democrat and Republican, and they've all said the same thing, which is why I have a bill with Byron Donalds, of all people, who's running for governor, endorsed by President Trump, to get FEMA out of Homeland. But that's not what they've done. What they've done and what the secretary has done, and I don't know if the secretary has even done this with the White House even knowing. Okay, the secretary has taken something that needed help and she has completely broken it. I believe what you're going to see is this summer, the secretary has turned FEMA into the Newark Airport. I think you're going to see it fail in ways we don't yet know. And it's just amazing to watch Arkansas, who had met the thresholds that are mandated in the Stafford act, not get their declaration. And let me explain, in emergency management time, it's all about time. It's all about going quickly. In fact, that's what the President said he wanted to speed up fema. Yet the secretary has made everything slower. Nothing is more efficient. Remember Doge Department of Government efficiency? What? They forgot the E piece. Efficiency. FEMA is not more efficient. No. Is not more efficient. In fact, there's not a single thing that is working more efficiently. But Fema has lost 30% of its workforce. Okay. A lot of these were senior people knew what they were doing, you got regional offices that are empty and they're delaying declarations. Delaying declarations means that states aren't going to spend money, right? Locals aren't going to spend money. These are fiscally constrained areas. They don't have it. I mean, I said to the speaker and to Steve Scalise and to others like you guys know this, without fema, if Louisiana gets hit by, you know, a category four storm, okay, from the Gulf, you know, your state goes bankrupt without fema. Mississippi goes bankrupt, Alabama goes bankrupt. So when you're watching those people who are saying they're not getting any help, it's because the states don't have the money, the cities don't have the money and they rely on FEMA and they're supposed to be getting what's called individual assistance, which we want to try to speed up the process. That's what they're waiting on. And because there's no declaration, they can't get individual assistance. So there will be towns that will look like that who won't get rebuilt without fema. And when we get into hurricane season, usually they get what's called a pre landfall declaration as the storm's approaching because we know how the track is going to be. You know, we give them a pre landfall deck which allows you to move ice, water, power generation, life, health, safety, swift water rescue and lets the state and locals know that they're going to get reimbursed. These local governments won't spend any money in Florida. And look, Florida has the best emergency management department in the country. But we rely on the money, right, so that we can go move our logistics. And if the state is worried that that money is not coming, if they're worried that is going to get delayed, you're going to have state legislatures, weighing in on what can we do that? Can we do this? And so this is not what many people thought when we heard about reform and making FEMA faster and shrinking the department to get a focus on response recovery. What the Secretary has done right now has been totally counterintuitive. And she's exposed the President, by the way, if I'm being honest. She has exposed the President because we're going to get into the hurricane season and we're going to see FEMA fail in ways that we've never seen before. And the President's going to be like, well, we knew it needed reform, yeah, but, but the secretary, Mr. President has broken FEMA in ways that it's not. It's going to expose you in red States, if they don't get lucky, if we don't get lucky in hurricane season and we have a bad hurricane season, right, we get bad storms. We get an F4 tornado in one of these red states, I mean, the president's going to have a department that doesn't work.

Political Commentator (10:06)

Congressman is the former head of emergency management in Florida dealing with disaster relief at a state level. You know this more than anyone. So when you said that FEMA is going to fail in a way that we've never seen before based on the way the Trump administration has been handling things so far, does that mean mass casualty events that can otherwise be avoided?

Congressmember Jared Moskowitz (10:30)

Listen, the FEMA's main course, right, is to support the operations locally down at the state and down at the local level. It's always been their deal getting the resources down. We want to speed that up. The faster you get resources down, the faster the folks on the ground, the state and local, can move. So if FEMA is delaying stuff, and by the way, all grants right now are paused in fema. I don't know if you know this. They've paused all grants, things that were, you know, have previous declarations, previous presidential declarations. And the secretary has no authority in the Stafford act or in the Homeland, in the Homeland act, which was passed after Katrina. She has no authority to put blanket pauses on these things. In fact, they contemplated that in these acts and it's strictly prohibited, there are criteria which you could do that and you're supposed to be given due process to appeal that. None of that is going on. And so, yes, Ben, at the end of the day, if these resources come slower, it could mean more deaths and it could mean towns are going to suffer, people are going to suffer and it's not going to save any money in the long term because the longer it takes for resources to down, I think the more expensive it gets to do some of these things.

Political Commentator (11:43)

It's a segue into talking about this disaster budget because FEMA was completely under attack in this disaster budget bill. There's a lot of things that we've highlighted here that makes this bill very dangerous. It's attack on Medicaid, it's attack on Medicare. We're learning. Although silencers and suppressors, they were the big winners along with the billionaires.

Congressmember Jared Moskowitz (12:06)

Tanning beds. Come on in there for tanning beds. Finally taking us into the golden age.

Political Commentator (12:13)

You have unique observational perspectives on all sorts of things, but particularly this budget bill. Reflecting on that, you and I are recording this on a Friday. This video is going to drop On Friday. What do you make of it? Where do we go from here?

Congressmember Jared Moskowitz (12:30)

So, I mean, listen, they did everything they said they were going to do. We told you that they were going to do it. And they were saying, oh, no, we're not going to cut Medicaid. The president said, oh, no, we're not going to touch Medicaid. Well, they did. The House cut it by $700 billion. It's going to take money away from the most needy, the bottom 10%, and give it to the top 10% of the tax cuts. Don't listen to me. That's literally what the CBO has said. That is what third party folks have said. And even worse, it's going to add all of this, right, to the debt. $3 trillion a year. You got Thomas Massie saying that he thinks it's going to add $20 trillion to the debt. Right. You're seeing the bond market going down, which is how we float our economy. When we sell those bonds to other countries, the yields on that are going up because no one wants to buy our debt. The stock market's down today because, guess what? We're back to tariffs. Thought the president learned his lesson, didn't. Now we're raising tariffs on the EU and on Apple again. And so this is, unfortunately what happens when you lose elections. Elections have consequences. And they have all of government. They have no breaks. They're drunk with power, okay? And the only way we're gonna send a message to them, the only way we're gonna be able to put brakes on this and stop this, is to make Hakeem Jeffries Speaker. President Trump is fully in charge. There's nobody. They all caved. Everybody caved, as we knew they would. Okay? Nobody stood up on the principles that they've yelled and screamed. When Democrats are in charge, those are all gone out the window. They have no more principles. They can't talk to us about that. They can't talk to us about spending money. They. They did everything they claim they didn't want to do. And, you know, it's going to hurt. It's going to hurt a lot of people at, you know, in the bottom. In the bottom 10%.

Political Commentator (14:20)

You know, look, I think that what's going on with FEMA is unfortunately going to be the biggest story of this summer and in hurricane season. So I'm using this platform every day, just warning as many people as we can get ahead in front of. I know this is not the sexiest issue to talk about right now, but I.

Congressmember Jared Moskowitz (14:39)

Well, that's usually what happens in emergency management, right? We don't talk about it when you don't need it. And then as soon as you need it, that's when we get the function. But if it doesn't work. And that's why I'm raising the alarm now. I'm not raising the alarm, Ben. Cause look, you're talking to a Democrat who worked for a Republican in Florida. Emergency management supposed to be nonpartisan because it affects Americans, okay? And so look, I'm out there, you know, trying to put this on the radar of the president and the people in the West Wing. I'm trying to sound the alarm now while we have a couple of months maybe to kind of fix some of the damage that has gone on in Homeland. But if we get into September, with the way things are now, okay, and we don't get lucky, and we do have storms, and Noah is calling for an above average hurricane season, 60% chance of that. I am deeply concerned about what is gonna go on in some of these states. We're seeing it already with these tornadoes. I'm real worried. And so, you know, the only thing I can do is tell people what I know. How I look at it. I'm trying to do it in a nonpartisan way. I'm trying to just give them the truth, okay? That's why I'm saying, yes, the President was right, that FEMA needed reform, but that's not what the secretary has done. What the secretary has done is she took something that needed help and she has just destroyed it.

Political Commentator (15:57)

Congressmember Moskowitz, thanks for joining us as always. Thank you, everybody. Hit subscribe. Let's get to 5 million subscribers. Can't get enough Midas. Check out the Midas substack for ad. Free articles, reports, podcasts, daily recaps from Ron Filipkowski and more. Sign up for free now@midasplus.com.