Recovery from this week’s storms and flooding is likely to cost millions of dollars. But what if the federal government doesn’t have the money for flood relief? Missouri’s senior senator worries about that, too.
Disaster relief money is included in the budget that underwrites federal government operations now. But Senator McCaskill worries that long-term partisan congressional deadlocks on budget issues could hurt people who are hurting. “It is worrisome to me that we are not going to have resources available to help people in times of flooding or natural disaster,” says McCaskill, who also says concerns about year-after-year of mandatory sequestration cuts are not just Washington rhetoric. “If we just turn out the lights, like sequestration will in fact cause, then it is going to set our economy back and it will cause some very difficult choices to have to be made,” she continues. She says those choices will inflict widespread pain, especially as the cuts make it harder to provide federal money to recover from future disasters.