Political Quotes

“I first want to thank the chairman, the ranking member, and their staff for their perseverance on this legislation. This is really an amazing accomplishment that I think is going to transform how we plan for, how we prepare for, and how we respond to and recover from disasters. Mr. Speaker, we spent more than $1.5 trillion responding to 220 disasters that have cost our Nation more than $1 billion each since 1980. We have this process in the Federal Government where we spend billions after a disaster rather than spending millions on the front- end actually preparing and making our communities more resilient. This bill begins to change that. There are a number of very important lessons learned, commonsense provisions in this legislation. I want to highlight the duplication of benefits, section 1210, of this legislation that reverses this crazy Federal policy whereby it was incentivizing people to wait, to slow down recovery, while costing FEMA more dollars in temporary housing, eliminating this process whereby loans and grants were viewed as being duplicative. Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price), a key appropriator on these issues.”