Vice President Kamala Harris' recent assertion the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) budget was crafted for the needs of a bygone time, simply is not accurate, Rep. Carlos Gimenez, R-Fla., told Newsmax.
Its budget is "actually constructed around current needs," Gimenez told Thursday's "National Report."
"Then obviously there are things that happen throughout the year that you don't account for, some extraordinary event, and then we go back and appropriate additional money for that," he said. "But FEMA has certainly enough money to do what it needs to do and there's flexibility in that budget so that the director and the president can move whatever resources they need in order to protect the American people.
"Don't tell me you don't have enough resources. We only have a $1 trillion budget for God's sakes, OK? So you do."
Harris' comments to The Weather Channel about strengthening FEMA's budget for the future were "double-speak for climate change," Gimenez said.
"Then we have to throw money at climate change because these things are getting worse and worse and worse," he said. "The only reason they're getting worse is because we have more people living in the vulnerable areas. Hurricanes have been around for a long, long time. And so they've been striking the United States mainland for a long time.
"But the coastal areas haven't been as populated. That's why you're going to see more damage and more loss of life, because these coastal areas are now populated where before there used to be nothing there.
"Look, Florida, 100 years ago, nobody was here."
There is "plenty of money in the federal government" to provide assistance to people recovering from Hurricane Milton, a powerful Category 3 hurricane that made landfall on Florida's west coast Wednesday night, Gimenez added, lamenting that the funds just need to be spent on American citizens and not illegal aliens.
"There is no doubt that we'll be spending billions of dollars with all these illegal immigrants that have entered the country due to Harris and [President Joe] Biden," Gimenez concluded. "That's taxpayer money that could be used for other purposes, such as hurricane relief and making sure that FEMA has every single thing it needs and other areas of our economy and our other needs that our country has, versus housing and giving all these benefits to these migrants that are coming in under the Biden-Harris administration."
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Nicole Wells ✉
Nicole Weatherholtz, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
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