White House is seeking $14.5 billion in Harvey Relief from Congress without any offsetting spending cuts in the new stop-gap spending bill – PB/TK
White House to Ask for $14.5 Billion Down Payment for Harvey Relief – By Glenn Thrush (nytimes.com) /Sept 1 2017
The White House is asking Congress for more than $14 billion as a down payment on Hurricane Harvey recovery efforts, sending Republican leaders a request late Friday for $7.8 billion in immediate aid that will be quickly followed by a request for another $6.7 billion, officials said.
The initial funding represents only a fraction of the long-term storm relief for flood-ravaged parts of Texas and Louisiana, which is likely to far exceed the $50 billion in funds allocated to northeastern states in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
President Trump is expected to make a pitch for quick passage of storm funding legislation when he travels on Saturday to the Houston area and to Lake Charles, La., his second trip to the region in the week since the hurricane made landfall at Rockport, Texas, inundating the Gulf Coast with record-breaking floods and rainfall.
The first, stand-alone bill would channel the vast majority of the funds to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the rest to other agencies, including $450 million for the Small Business Administration. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, told fellow Democrats that the White House budget director, Mick Mulvaney, would not be seeking offsetting spending cuts, as he insisted on for other emergency spending when he was a conservative member of the House.
That first $7.8 billion request includes a letter signaling Mr. Trump’s intention to ask for an additional $6.7 billion to replenish federal disaster relief funds, to be added to a stopgap spending bill that Congress must pass before the end of the month to keep the government open, according to a senior administration official who helped draft the proposal.
A House leadership official confirmed the spending totals on Friday night, reflecting an increase in aid from a $12 billion package that just hours earlier the White House had said it would seek.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump will meet with Republican House and Senate leaders to discuss a path forward on tax legislation after the failure of their health care effort earlier this summer. On Wednesday, he will huddle with leaders of both parties at the White House in an effort to jump-start his stalled legislative agenda.
Congress returns next week after a monthlong recess, and the request for disaster aid adds another issue to an already frantic September for lawmakers.
The Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, has urged lawmakers to raise the debt limit by Sept. 29. Republican leaders in Congress are determined to resolve that issue, but they have not yet explained publicly how and when they plan to pass the necessary legislation to do so.
Right after that deadline, another potential crisis looms: The fiscal year concludes at the end of September, and lawmakers are nowhere close to a spending deal for the next one. As a result, they are expected to pass a stopgap spending measure to keep the government open for business past the end of September.
Lawmakers have other pressing issues to address as well, including measures related to the National Flood Insurance Program and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. And now that the Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act has collapsed, some lawmakers want to develop narrow, bipartisan legislation to shore up insurance markets under the health law.
It remains unclear how Republicans congressional leaders plan to go about passing all of the time-sensitive measures — and what provisions could wind up combined. For example, one possibility is to increase the debt limit in the same measure that provides the first $7.8 billion in disaster aid.
Mr. Trump has made a point of saying that pursuing his larger agenda is secondary to ensuring that storm-afflicted Gulf residents are given the resources they need to recover from the hurricane and subsequent deluge, which has destroyed or damaged more than 100,000 homes according to federal estimates.
The president has also made a personal financial commitment, announcing on Thursday that he intended to donate $1 million to a relief charity — and asking reporters for suggestions on where to send the money.
“He has not finalized where all of that will go, and I was actually going to use that as a perfect segue to remind everybody, if you have suggestions, he is very open to hearing those,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said on Friday.
Mrs. Sanders said she would get back to a reporter who asked if the donation would come from Mr. Trump’s personal bank account or from his charitable foundation, which is largely funded by outside contributors.
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