Chuck Schumer: “today, I rise to offer this amendment to restore more than $300 million in funding to the Federal Emergency Management…”

“today, I rise to offer this amendment to restore more than $300 million in funding to the Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster relief account. This is the amount that the President had requested in his budget. So this is hardly an outlandish fee or a fee that came up out of our heads. As we all know too well, our country has been visited by disaster far too many times in the last year. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, devastating wildfires in Texas, Arizona, and California, and now the recent flooding in the Northeast, devastating New York as well as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Vermont, Maryland, and Virginia. Some of my staff people, and I know many others, have had flooding in their homes in the Washington area because of that. Unfortunately, FEMA has come up short every time. The Agency always seems to be on its heels when it needs to be on its toes. With all of the trouble that FEMA has, we should not be cutting the funding that goes directly to the people who are victims of these terrible disasters. We have seen the disaster. We have seen the terrible flooding. We know it is all too real. A week ago Friday, Senator Clinton and I toured the affected regions in upstate New York and saw the enormity of the flood and the work it is going to take to get it clean. I will share this with you. We met a businessperson who started out a new business and lived in the Catskill Mountains. He had been flooded twice in previous years.…”