Republican vice presidential hopeful Sen. JD Vance shredded the Harris-Biden administration’s handling of the Hurricane Helene aftermath Monday, likening it to “the DMV at industrial scale.”
While defending the Trump campaign’s complaints about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sending a “bucket of money” to help illegal immigrants released into the US, Vance (R-Ohio) accused the administration of wasting resources.
“The Biden-Harris administration has turned FEMA effectively into an agency that helps to resettle and helps to deal with illegal immigration. That is just fundamentally going to distract focus from their core job of helping American citizens in their time of need,” Vance told “Fox & Friends.”
“I think the fundamental mistake that Kamala Harris’ administration has made here … is that from the get-go, you should have imposed military-style command and control.”
Since the fall of 2022, FEMA has spent more than $1.4 billion to tackle the migrant crisis, including $780 million from the FEMA Emergency Food and Shelter Program and $640.9 million from the Shelter and Services Program.
Defenders of the Harris-Biden administration have argued that the tranche of FEMA money used for the border crisis was never intended to go toward natural disasters, which has a separate batch of dedicated funds.
Allies of former President Donald Trump, including his daughter-in-law and Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump have argued that FEMA should have tapped into the tranche of funds used on the border to assist the disaster zones as well.
Vance insisted Monday that there needs to be much better coordination of federal resources.
“You’ve got eight different bureaucratic organizations, and you’ve got a lot of different bureaucratic fiefdoms that sometimes delay the provision of necessary resources,” he explained.
“You need to empower a military commander on the ground to get helicopters to where they need to go, to get supplies to where they need to go, to cut through some of the FAA bureaucracy,” Vance added. “The problem here, I really believe, is just — it’s like the DMV at industrial scale.”
The White House contends that FEMA has enough funds for the initial hurricane response but that it is eventually going to need Congress to replenish its funds.
“It is incompetence of the highest order,” Vance insisted. “What Donald Trump would do, if he was president, is impose real leadership, force the bureaucracy to be responsive, not at a bureaucratic pace, but at a business pace to the needs of American citizens.”