As most of us are aware, Hurricane Harvey recently ripped through the Gulf Coast, leaving a path of devastation and especially affecting Houston. While tragic, I think the event has helped to unite us as a country and remind us that at the end of the day, we are all Americans.
But now comes the rebuilding, a prolonged effort in areas devastated in the way Houston was. While Harvey is over, another storm is brewing in Washington, DC — the budget battle, an entrenched fight that becomes much more complex with the necessity for new allocations of emergency funds.
Congress has until Sept. 30 to make a new budget and ultimately raise the debt ceiling in order to prevent a government shutdown. Meanwhile, on the ground in Houston, President Trump has promised to do whatever it takes to help rebuild after Harvey. Which almost certainly means more funds to aid the relief effort.
FEMA currently has $3.3 billion in funds for disaster relief. Estimates by Moody's Analytics have the damage costs of Harvey somewhere between $40 billion to $50 billion. So the question is: Where is the rest of the money going to come from?
This much I can say — It shouldn’t be from the government.
Allocating more funds could move up the already-looming deadline to raise the debt ceiling and result in another government shutdown. We cannot disregard the fact that raising the debt ceiling inches us even closer to the $20 trillion mark for our federal deficit.
But the reality is that it is going to be almost impossible for Congress to not pass additional funds in response to Harvey. So what it has to do now is prioritize the spending.
Spending money on a border wall in Texas seems even more impractical than it did before, with the economic devastation that occurred on the Texas coastline. The hurricane may eliminate Republicans' ability to levy any sort of spending cuts if relief funding gets lumped into an increased spending package. With the devastation in the state, voting against a package that includes relief funding would be near political suicide.
But no matter how Congress reacts to Harvey or how much money it ends up allocating for the relief effort, the responsibility ultimately falls on the shoulders of the average American. As seen in past disasters — like Hurricane Katrina, where school buses sat idle in New Orleans as private hospitals helped evacuees by flying them out in their private helicopters — when government fails they get a "bigger budget and more power," resulting in more bureaucracy.
In times of crisis, the individuals and the private sector have often been much more efficient than the government. The more we do to help, the less our government has to spend, so hopefully the answer in what the government should do in response to Harvey is nothing. But that will depend on private citizens.