Oklahoma: The battle over disaster aid

last updated 8 January 2015

When natural disasters strike, politicians have always fought for as much aid as possible for their battered constituents, said Steve Benen in MSNBC.com. But in the wake of last week’s Oklahoma tornado, Republican Sen. Tom Coburn became a noticeable exception. After a twister wiped out a swath of the state, killing 24 people and displacing 20,000, Coburn staked out “a far-right position on federal disaster relief,” saying any additional federal emergency aid for his constituents—many of whom lost everything—should be paid for by cuts elsewhere in the federal budget. Coburn at least got credit for consistency, since he cited that same principle in opposing sending federal disaster relief to New York and New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy. Given the scale of suffering in Oklahoma, said E.J. Dionne Jr. in The Washington Post, it’s “astonishing” that Coburn thinks his obsession with deficits takes priority over people left homeless and destitute. Where is his heart?

I’m not opposed to disaster aid to Oklahoma, said Sen. Tom Coburn in CNN.com. This is a bogus issue, since the Federal Emergency Management Agency has stockpiled $11.6 billion to pay for disaster response this year, which is more than enough to cover the damage in Oklahoma. But if FEMA exhausts its funding on disasters this year, yes, I believe we should fund any additional relief by diverting money from some other area of the federal budget, instead of borrowing it. When disasters become an excuse for more borrowing, what you get is the $50 billion Hurricane Sandy package I opposed because it had become an “all-you-can-eat buffet” of pork projects, with funding gifts to Alaskan fisheries, NASA, and Head Start. Even in times of disaster, the federal government needs to make hard choices, said Michael D. Tanner in USNews.com. “Requiring offsetting cuts might cause legislators to think twice about loading disaster relief bills with unrelated pork.”

But think of the implications of funding disaster aid through cuts to other programs, said Jurek Martin in FT.com. It will inevitably worsen the country’s “rampant regionalism,” with heartland politicians opposing disaster aid for the “Sodoms and Gomorrahs” on the East Coast and California. In the past, natural disasters brought out the best in this country, as Americans put aside partisanship and provincialism to help one another through great hardship. Sadly, in this increasingly partisan era, “that may no longer be the case.”