Obama's Sequester Proposal Slashes Funds for FEMA, Disaster Relief

More facts you should be aware of..

As Hurricane Sandy approaches the northeast United States, the left is attempting to politicize the storm, attacking Republican nominee Mitt Romney and his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), for wanting to shift more responsibility for disaster relief from the federal government to the states.

They ignore the fact that President Barack Obama's proposal for the upcoming budget sequester would cut nearly $900 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, including disaster relief, food and shelter, and flood management at both the federal and state levels.

What you should be aware of

The cuts, detailed on pages 94 through 96 of the White House's sequestration proposal, released in mid-September, show how far the Obama administration has been willing to go in order to preserve the idea of tax hikes on "millionaires and billionaires" rather than reaching a comprehensive grand bargain on deficit reduction that does not place additional burdens on the economy or essential services.

Does he want to undercut for a reason?

Obama's proposed cuts to FEMA include the following (emphasis added):

Flood Hazard Mapping and Risk Analysis Program - $8 million
State and Local Emergency Programs (non-defense) - $183 million
State and Local Emergency Programs (defense) - $5 million
United States Fire Administration and Training - $4 million
Salaries and Expenses (non-defense) - $75 million
Salaries and Expenses (defense) - $7 million
Disaster Relief - $580 million
Emergency Food and Shelter - $10 million
Radiological Emergency Preparedness Program - $3 million
National Pre-disaster Mitigation Fund - $3 million

These cuts likely underestimate the total cuts proposed to disaster relief functions, since the U.S. armed forces--subject to separate cuts in Obama's sequester proposals--frequently provide support to FEMA operations, as well as essential search and rescue services.

The White House sequestration proposal also warns: "The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s ability to respond to incidents of terrorism and other catastrophic events would be undermined."

Why no mention about Obama's plans while they are out criticizing Romney for their plan

While Romney and Ryan are merely proposing to shift some of the emergency functions to the states, or to balance further increases in FEMA funding with offsetting cuts in other discretionary spending, Obama has proposed actual cuts, at both the federal and state levels.

www.breitbart.com...
www.whitehouse.gov...

reply to post by jibeho


Uh..... the sequester is a massive budget cut, so all parts of the budget will have to be cut, this includes disaster relief. There's no way around it unless you want to cut other things, such as defense, even more. The budget sequester option was arrived at by bipartisan agreement. The GOP and Romney wants to gut the FEMA budget in general, i.e. even without the drastic budget sequestering, which is not what Obama or the Democrats want. In other words, you are comparing apples and oranges. The cuts you show for Obama are for the drastically cut sequester budget. Romney's budget proposals are for just a regular, i.e. no sequester, budget. To make Obama appear to be the bad guy in this case is just more typical right-wing prevarication and conflation. But then you folks wouldn't have much to rant about if you didn't continue with these tired, tendentious tactics that twist the facts.

Originally posted by MrInquisitive
reply to post by jibeho

 

Uh..... the sequester is a massive budget cut, so all parts of the budget will have to be cut, this includes disaster relief. There's no way around it unless you want to cut other things, such as defense, even more. The budget sequester option was arrived at by bipartisan agreement. The GOP and Romney wants to gut the FEMA budget in general, i.e. even without the drastic budget sequestering, which is not what Obama or the Democrats want. In other words, you are comparing apples and oranges. The cuts you show for Obama are for the drastically cut sequester budget. Romney's budget proposals are for just a regular, i.e. no sequester, budget. To make Obama appear to be the bad guy in this case is just more typical right-wing prevarication and conflation. But then you folks wouldn't have much to rant about if you didn't continue with these tired, tendentious tactics that twist the facts.

edit on 30-10-2012 by MrInquisitive because: (no reason given)

EXACTLY....... you got it. Also, Fema is just not monetarily sustainable. Simply printing money only makes it all the more expensive. There are too many programs taking presidence and the money only spreads so far....

reply to post by jibeho


It's funny you call it Obama's sequester proposal. If you look up sequestration on Google the 2nd link goes to wiki which says: "A U.S. legal procedure in which automatic spending cuts are triggered, notably implemented in the Budget Control Act of 2011". Notice the term "automatic spending cuts".

The proposal was for a congressional "super committee" be set up to come to an agreement for all to reduce the deficit in exchange for a debt-ceiling increase. If they had come to an agreement in the first place the sequestration wouldn't be necessary.

The goal outlined in the Budget Control Act of 2011 was to cut at least $1.5 trillion over the coming 10 years, (avoiding much larger "sequestration" across-the-board cuts which would be equal to the debt ceiling increase of $1.2 trillion incurred by Congress through a failure to produce a deficit reduction bill), therefore bypassing Congressional debate and resulting in a passed bill by December 23, 2011.[3] On November 21, the committee concluded its work, issuing a statement that began with the following: "After months of hard work and intense deliberations, we have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee’s deadline."

Because the "super committee" couldn't come to an agreement, automatic spending cuts were put into play across the board. It sounds more like a failure of Congress than the president himself.

reply to post by jibeho


FEMA is worthless. He should have eliminated FEMA. The Red Cross works harder and longer for a lot less, and does a whole lot more with what they have.

reply to post by jibeho


I'm sick of this Conservative scumbag Obama cutting into our precious Socialist programs. Sd need a good leftist libtard to keep government spending on socialist federal big-brother programs like FEMA. That is why I am voting for Obama. *this guy* (you know, the one who's "not like you and me") will just cut, cut, cut, when all us good Republican libtards want to spend, spend , spend, and have the federal gov do everything for us! (eeew, some of my oozing sarcasm dripped on me!)

Ok wait, now I'm confused...wasn't it Republicans who claim to be "conservative", and who want an absolute minimum of federal government / federal spending? These people used to at least bother tricking the gullible people who vote for them by claiming to be conservative, such as those who consider Reagan (he of the 315% 8-year debt increase) a conservative, but Obama, with a 60% increase, is considered a liberal.

Why don't we just call it like it is...fiscally, Obama is a liberal, and Reagan was an Ultra-Uber-Super-Duper liberal?

reply to post by jibeho


So basically government is too big and not sustainable...which is something i hear repubs always say... so obama is addressing that and then you shift your position to what dems say when repubs want to cut.

a regular ol flip flopper huh??

I am for neither party but i see the lack of consistency here. So Obama is damned if he does and damned if he don't.

good, hes probably doing us a favor(and doesnt even know it), think about this, cut fema altogether WHAM CRAPLOADS of money for more disasters, im pretty sure we have an army, coast guard, national guard, reserves, corps, army engineers the list goes on and one, do we really need fema to drive around in 65k suvs, acting like they give a $%^&. the way they handle everything, is complete fail.how much did we pay for alll those trailers full of chemicals that were making people ill, why didnt they use the fema camps (learning center) to house people for katrina, are they going to now for people during this storm? the list goes on and on why they are complete fail, get rid of the piece of crap fema and use what we already got for free, put the rest of the money towards something usefull, like roads, school, healthcare anything but fema.

Originally posted by Plotus

Originally posted by MrInquisitive
reply to post by jibeho

 

Uh..... the sequester is a massive budget cut, so all parts of the budget will have to be cut, this includes disaster relief. There's no way around it unless you want to cut other things, such as defense, even more. The budget sequester option was arrived at by bipartisan agreement. The GOP and Romney wants to gut the FEMA budget in general, i.e. even without the drastic budget sequestering, which is not what Obama or the Democrats want. In other words, you are comparing apples and oranges. The cuts you show for Obama are for the drastically cut sequester budget. Romney's budget proposals are for just a regular, i.e. no sequester, budget. To make Obama appear to be the bad guy in this case is just more typical right-wing prevarication and conflation. But then you folks wouldn't have much to rant about if you didn't continue with these tired, tendentious tactics that twist the facts.

edit on 30-10-2012 by MrInquisitive because: (no reason given)

EXACTLY....... you got it. Also, Fema [sic] is just not monetarily sustainable. Simply printing money only makes it all the more expensive. There are too many programs taking presidence [sic] and the money only spreads so far....

Thanks for acknowledging/admitting what I wrote -- and thereby undercutting your own argument. In fact, I honestly cannot tell what your point/argument is, given the incoherency of what you're saying. First you acknowledge that the cuts you cite are for the extreme sequestering budget and not for a regular budget, and that the GOP proposes cuts to FEMA in a normal budget. You say FEMA is not sustainable, so how come you created a post which spoke negatively of Obama cutting FEMA in a sequester budget? You seemed to initially want to make Obama look bad for cutting the FEMA budget, albeit he would only do so in the sequestering budget, but then you say the FEMA budget has to be cut because it isn't sustainable. It would seem that you would approve of this cut by Obama, but you portray it as a bad thing.

Furthermore, you seem to be saying that we don't have money for natural disasters at home, but that we should keep spending on defense like a drunk sailor on shore leave. I think the folks hit by various natural disasters in the US would beg to differ with you. And your creating this post and responding to my comment in the midst of this Hurricane Sandy disaster, insisting we don't have money for FEMA and natural disaster relief, is the height of cognitive dissonance. We have money to blow to the tune of $20 billion a year on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we don't have the funds to provide disaster relief to our citizens at home? Wow. As far as programs taking precedence over FEMA, I guess you think the three billion/year in tax subsidies for the oil industry, during windfall profit quarters, is more important than helping people whose homes and businesses have been destroyed by a massive storm -- because the current/ongoing budget has just this corporate welfare, which the GOP refuses to cut. Again, Wow.

The whole point behind this thread was to illuminate the finger pointing from Obama with one hand while he tries to hide behind the other hand with regards to Sequestration. A common tactic used by him regarding a variety of issues.

Think back to the debate when Obama said the following

"First of all, the sequester is not something that I've proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed. It will not happen"

"While both parties are culpable for sequestration because the Budget Control Act passed Congress, the president proposed it originally and ultimately owns its outcome," said Mackenzie Eaglen, an expert on defense with the conservative American Enterprise Institute and an adviser to the Romney campaign. "That is because he alone can lead by calling the party leaders together for a resolution today if he wanted as president."

Obama said that the sequester -- and the defense cuts that would result from it -- was not his proposition. "It is something that Congress has proposed," he said in the debate.

But it was Obama’s negotiating team that came up with the idea for defense cuts in 2011, though they were intended to prod Congress to come up with a better deal for reining in the deficit, not as an effort to make those cuts reality.

Meanwhile, members of both parties in Congress voted for the legislation that set up the possibility of sequestration. Obama’s position is that Congress should now act to avoid those across-the-board cuts.

Obama can’t rightly say the sequester isn’t his, but he did need cooperation from Congress to get to this point. We rate the statement Mostly False.

www.politifact.com...

Obama misstated the truth during the debate and does not like to be called out on the facts of his Sequestration.

Romney and Ryan simply want more authority and allocations placed directly into the states hands. Obama apparently agrees because he just said he would waive all of the red tape for the states applied for federal disaster recovery funds. Red tape that would be unneeded if the states had MORE control.... Plenty of money can be saved by cutting the red tape!! Everywhere!!!!!!

ETA
Don't believe the crap that Media Matters is selling. That pile has expired!!! They have wiped Obama clean of all accountability for a reason.... amazing how people still buy it...