The deserving versus the undeserving
According to an Apr. 12 statement from House Appropriations Committee chair Harold Rogers (R-KY), the committee, when it crafted H.R. 1473 , the fiscal 2011 budget resolution, “went line-by-line through agency budgets.” That resolution cut $786 million — a 26 percent reduction — from a FEMA state and local grant program to train first responders to prepare for and assist in emergencies. The bill also cut half the funding — $50 million — for a “predisaster mitigation” grant program that provides funding for state and local organizations to plan for disasters ahead of time.
Shannon Baxevanis, deputy director for the National Association of Regional Councils, which opposes the cuts to the FEMA programs, told Remapping Debate that while the FEMA state and local grant programs that were cut in H.R. 1473 are intended to aid in defending against terrorist attacks, the funding also helps emergency workers with responding to natural disasters, such as the Texas wildfires or the tornadoes and floods that have devastated the South and Midwest in recent weeks.
The grants could be used for such objectives as purchasing vehicles, providing training for first responders, and updating emergency communication systems, Baxevanis said.
H.R. 1473 passed the House on a 260-167 vote (many Republicans opposed the bill because they thought the cuts were not deep enough). The Senate quickly followed suit and passed the bill in an 81-19 vote.
H.R. 1, the fiscal 2011 spending bill drawn up by House Republican leaders to reflect their legislative priorities, went even further in cutting programs to assist with disaster planning and response. It gutted a FEMA firefighter assistance grants program, cutting $90 million (23 percent) from funding to provide equipment, vehicles, and training to local fire departments and completely zeroing out a $420 million program to assist fire departments with recruiting and hiring firefighters. (President Obama in his fiscal 2012 budget proposed eliminating a $60 million FEMA grant program to fund emergency operations centers, but did not propose changes to grants for state and local first responders, firefighter assistance, or predisaster mitigation.)
H.R. 1 passed the House on a 235-189 vote with the support of nearly all Republicans in the chamber. Of the 32-member Texas delegation, 22 of the 23 Republicans, including Conaway, voted in favor of the bill while one Republican did not vote. Of the Texas Democrats, 8 voted against the bill and one did not vote. The bill failed in the Senate on a 44-56 vote (it needed 60 votes to pass) despite the support of both Cornyn and Hutchison.
Wasteful FEMA?
Why were the FEMA grant programs cut so dramatically in the Republican spending bills?
“Our bill targets wasteful and duplicative spending, makes strides to rein in out-of-control federal bureaucracies, and will help bring our nation one step closer to eliminating our job-crushing level of debt,” Rogers said of H.R. 1473.
Baxevanis, however, said that not enough research was done to determine the effectiveness of the programs whose funding was eliminated in the bills.
“They had a top-line number to meet,” Baxevanis said, referring to the dollar amount in cuts that bill drafters were asked to achieve. “They were looking everywhere to make reductions and eliminations.”
In a 2009 report, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, took aim at the firefighter assistance grants program. The report argued that the grants were wasteful because it said its own analysis showed the grants had no impact on firefighter and civilian deaths or injuries.
A 2003 evaluation by the U.S. Fire Administration, on the other hand, found that the firefighter grant program was “highly effective in improving the readiness and capabilities of firefighters across the nation.” A separate evaluation the same year by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General concluded that the grant program “succeeded in achieving a balanced distribution of funding through a competitive grant process.”
But this is different…
In interviews with Remapping Debate, representatives for Texas lawmakers who were critical of FEMA’s denial of Texas’ disaster declaration request insisted that their appeals for federal assistance were made only in extraordinary circumstances and were motivated by the unprecedented destruction caused by the Texas wildfires. They also emphasized that the livelihoods of constituents were at stake.
A Hutchison spokesperson, in an emailed response, pointed out that H.R. 1473 increases the FEMA disaster relief fund by $1 billion, a 60 percent boost. A document on the Senate Appropriations Committee website, however, notes that the increase was provided to make up for a shortfall from past disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the Midwest floods of 2008.
A historical perspective on who “deserves” aid — part 2
How is it that a politician today can simultaneously call for cuts in programs and happily accept federal disaster aid for constituents? Soskis noted, first of all, that it was easy to see an element of “political opportunism” at play, but also an element of people separating abstract political considerations (those that are seen to have an impact on others) from those day-to-day decisions that resonate as having immediacy due to proximity, familiarity, or identification.
Back in the late 1800s, organizations like the Charity Organization Society sought to cut public relief spending in many major cities, Soskis says. The motto was “no alms but a friend,” so their point was “we won’t give you any money but we’ll sort of help you with moral support.”
“It turns out though that…several of the leaders of these organizations, despite their calls for basically doing away with public relief and private charity, when it came to someone coming up to them and asking for money, were unable to say no. And I think what that suggests is [that]…there are two levels of operation. There’s the political level where you’re talking about the state as sort of [an] abstract force — really separate from your own life — [and] often hostile to the kind of intimate forces that you find important… Then there are the decisions you want to make everyday. So for those who see the state as really removed from one’s personal life it’s sort of easy to make these calls for a lack of funding. But, when you need government, or when you’re approached yourself and confronted with poverty and confronted with need, the ability to talk about the poor in kind of an abstract way is sort of radically challenged.”
Remapping Debate asked Soskis about the problem created if the basis of giving is rooted in some sense of immediacy: Is it not less likely that someone would reach out from his own heart to those he cannot personally identify with or exert control over?
“I think that’s true,” responded Soskis. “The foundation of giving in the U.S. has always been an idea of neighborliness,” and the question of how to help people imagine that people who live far away and who may live in very different socioeconomic conditions can indeed be their neighbors is one that has been repeatedly posed in the United States for almost a hundred years.
“I think it’s probably safe to say that you can look at some of these funding debates and come to the conclusion that America is…still a very fractured nation,” concluded Soskis. “One in which the ideas of who constitutes our neighbor, who is deserving, are still very vexed.”
Interviewer: Craig Gurian