Zach Nunn's bad behavior
Also, Miller-Meeks joins DOGE
California’s wildfires aren’t even under control, and Republicans are rushing in to try to take advantage of the situation.
They have floated the idea of tying disaster aid to Democrats supporting an increase in the federal debt limit, a priority of Donald Trump’s. They also have suggested aid be tied to California changing its forest and water management policies.
Shamefully, Rep. Zach Nunn of Iowa is part of the effort.
Here’s what he said on Fox Business on Monday:
“We will certainly help those thousands of homes and families who’ve been devastated, but we also expect you to change bad behavior. We should look at the same for these blue states who have run away with a broken tax policy. We want to be able to help our colleagues in New York, California and New Jersey, but we also want, those governors need to change their tune now.”
Nunn is also connecting disaster aid with immigration policies in Los Angeles.
Such BS. But it’s not unexpected. Nunn is simply echoing GOP leaders who want to leverage the suffering of Californians so they can achieve their own political goals, even if they’re unrelated to the disaster. This also allows them to dodge pertinent questions about their inaction on climate change, which is contributing to a number of disastrous weather events.
Making federal disaster aid conditional is not how Congress has typically done business.
As the Washington Post reported:
In a wide bipartisan vote, Congress recently approved billions of dollars in new disaster funding for Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia after those states were struck by hurricanes Helene and Milton. All but one of those states is led by a Republican governor. Congress did not place conditions on that federal assistance.
Unfortunately, the kind of extortion Nunn is talking about sounds similar to the lecture the people of Davenport got in 2001, when the city got hit with damaging flooding.
President George W. Bush’s FEMA director, Joe Allbaugh, questioned why the city should get federal help, given its refusal to build structural flood protection. “How many times will the American taxpayers have to step in and take care of this flooding, which could be easily prevented by building dikes and levees,” he asked? (As I pointed out at the time, Texas, where Allbaugh worked for then-Gov. Bush, was a leader in the number of flood-prone properties that repeatedly cost the federal government’s flood insurance program.)
Thankfully, Sen. Chuck Grassley was having none of the criticism. He told Iowa reporters at the time that federal assistance wouldn’t be conditioned on whether the city built a floodwall. "That's the way the political process works," Grassley said. "It's also the humanitarian thing to do."
Maybe Grassley ought to have a talk with Zach Nunn.
Frankly, the only way for Democrats to put a stop to this nonsense is to make sure Republicans know in no uncertain terms if they follow through, then red states will face the same treatment when Democrats get back into power. Plenty of Republican-run states, like Texas and Florida, are susceptible to hurricanes. And, as I noted, they also have a lot of properties that flood repeatedly. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s state of Louisiana is one of them.
I don’t mind the federal government trying to lessen its financial risk. That’s a good thing. But it shouldn’t be done selectively and at the point of a gun, when disaster-struck states are at their most vulnerable.
In 2020, a derecho struck Iowa and people got little notice from the authorities. Yet, nobody in Congress said federal aid should be withheld until the state improved its early warning capability.
The absurdity of the Republicans’ extortion attempt was pointed out this week by Paul Krugman in a Substack column, where he wrote that even as Republicans bash California, the state has “in effect subsidized poorer, less productive (and yes, generally Republican-voting) states through the federal tax-and-transfer system.” Krugman cited the Rockefeller Institute of Government’s Balance of Payments report, which lists how much money the federal government spends in a state compared with the taxes its businesses and individuals pay.
For 2022, the most recent year available, the Institute’s report showed the federal government spent $15,603 per person in California, while it got back $17,731 in taxes per capita. That means Californians paid $2,129 more per person than they got back in spending.
In Iowa, on the other hand, the federal government spent $14,157 per person in the state, while only getting back $11,057 in taxes. In other words, Iowa got a $3,100 per person subsidy.
What would Iowa Republicans say if a Democratic president suddenly decided to tie disaster aid to eliminating that subsidy?
Grassley was right a quarter century ago when he said we shouldn’t play politics with people who have been victimized by a natural disaster. We shouldn’t try to take advantage of their misery in order to wring concessions out of their political leaders at the point of a gun.
It’s not responsible, nor is it the humanitarian thing to do.
Miller-Meeks joins DOGE Caucus
Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks announced this week she’s joining the House DOGE Caucus. That’s the group that says it’s going to work with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to cut spending.
This is probably a smart political move for Miller-Meeks. Fiscal conservatives and MAGA don’t really trust her and given how she vastly underperformed Trump in the 2024 election, barely squeezing out a win in Iowa’s 1st District, she’s going to need to shore up conservative support for 2026.
Still, it might be a hard sell for Miller-Meeks to convince MAGA she’s the kind of fiscal conservative that fits the DOGE mode.
The National Taxpayers Union, which grades lawmakers on opposing wasteful spending, higher taxes and regulations, only gave Miller-Meeks a score of 65% for 2023, a satisfactory rating but below the House GOP average.
Meanwhile, the Club for Growth, which scores lawmakers based on legislation related to economic growth, including taxes and spending, ranked Miller-Meeks 169th in the 435-member House.
Those grades don’t seem to be in keeping with the revolutionary fervor the DOGE crowd is selling.
Here’s a good example: Miller-Meeks just boasted of gaining President Joe Biden’s approval for a new economic grant program that, if funded, would spend $100 million a year in taxpayer money even though many fiscal conservatives have criticized these kinds of programs.
Miller-Meeks and Rep. Eric Sorensen, a Democrat who represents western Illinois in Congress, said their bill, introduced in April, would create jobs and support manufacturing and the nation’s supply chain. They call it the ONSHORE Act. The Biden administration also cited the ONSHORE Act as a tool to strengthen the ability of the federal Economic Development Administration, or EDA, to support manufacturing and the national supply chain.
A similar bi-partisan bill was introduced in the Senate last year.
A recent Urban Institute study said EDA investments in construction projects lead to job creation. But some conservative groups are definitely not fans. In 2023, an analyst at the Cato Institute questioned the EDA’s efficacy and said federal funding of such local projects wasn’t affordable. He added the agency’s budget had grown from $264 million in 2019 to $1.5 billion in 2023 and cited a number of EDA projects that he said, if useful, should have been funded by the private sector or the states.
Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which many consider a blueprint for the new Trump administration, also took a dim view of the EDA. It called the agency’s grant programs duplicative and proposed consolidating them with other programs and/or eliminating them.
In fact, in 2017, the Trump administration actually did propose eliminating the EDA.
Still, the agency has survived, and its reauthorization was celebrated by the Biden administration last month, suggesting it maintains a decent amount of support in Congress.
This may be a good sign for the Economic Development Administration and its grant programs. But it also demonstrates one of the hurdles Musk and Ramaswamy face in trying to dramatically cut federal spending.
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Congresswoman Miller-Meeks could outline her proposed cuts before any DOGE meeting and address why she hasn’t previously suggested such reductions. In response to Senator Ernst’s comments on DOGE and cuts, I wrote this piece.
As for Nunn, who may be positioning himself for a U.S. Senate run, he should clarify his stance by contrasting how Democratic presidents and Congresses have consistently funded disaster relief efforts in Republican-leaning areas.
Everyone has the right to say what they please. They also have the right to not listen. Sen. Grassley got it right and I'm sure the Federal Gov't will help California as it's the right thing to do.
As an aside, I'm a little perplexed as to why when NC and surrounding areas had their hurricane issues this same article wasn't written with the focus on the VP's comments regarding helping based on "equity" or the defensive statement that, "we are sending $750..."
With catastrophe comes the armchair quarterback to call the play retrospectively.