Lloyd Bentsen: “Mr. Chairman, first let me say on the previous amendment, I hope the House votes down the previous amendment, because…”

“Mr. Chairman, first let me say on the previous amendment, I hope the House votes down the previous amendment, because that amendment sort of adds insult to injury. What the author did was to take the FEMA money hostage and use it to try and rewrite the budget that the Congress voted on and passed in the last Congress. Mr. Chairman, I hope that amendment goes down. In addition, that amendment would still cut FEMA; that is the wrong direction. We have had debates on this today. This amendment is going to be struck in a point of order, because of the Budget Act; but the fact is that there is not enough money in the FEMA accounts to deal with the situation in Texas and Louisiana, not to mention Pennsylvania and other disasters like that, and also the State of Wisconsin. In fact, in the last 48 hours, FEMA has doubled their estimate of the damage costs that they will incur in Harris County alone from a billion dollars to $2 billion; and it is estimated that that cost will continue to rise, probably to about $4 billion. In fact, the Texas Medical Center, which is in my district, looks like it has incurred about $2 billion of damage on its own. There are 50,000 people either removed from their homes or their homes are in complete disrepair. This is a major disaster. FEMA only has about $1.1 billion of unobligated funds.”