In ripping the current administration for its slow response to help Hurricane Helene victims, Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance accused President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris of ordering the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to focus on helping illegal aliens more than U.S. citizens.
Vance wrote an opinion column for The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, when then-Category 5 Hurricane Milton was headed toward Florida. The Ohio senator detailed his criticisms of the Biden-Harris administration regarding both its response to Hurricane Helene and FEMA.
"During times of crisis and war, presidential leadership is critical to cut through competing bureaucratic fiefs and protect Americans from death and devastation," Vance began his column. "The Biden-Harris response to Hurricane Helene, the deadliest storm since Katrina, has the people of the Southeast and especially Appalachia paying an extraordinary price for the administration's incompetence."
Former President Donald Trump's running mate this year then described how Biden, Harris, the Democrat presidential candidate, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas did not prioritize helping hurricane victims in the days Helene approached the U.S. and after it made landfall on Sept. 26.
"While Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden flouted their duties, a bureaucratic bottleneck was delaying the deployment of active-duty military personnel to the western mountains of North Carolina," Vance said.
The senator added that by the evening of Oct. 4, fewer than half of the 1,000 troops authorized to deploy to the hurricane response zone were conducting operations and deployed to Western North Carolina.
It wasn't until North Carolina Republican Sens. Ted Budd and Thom Tillis issued a joint statement on Oct. 4 calling for "an active-duty military leader who has extensive experience with operations of this magnitude to lead moving forward" that the administration upped its response.
"In disaster response, every second counts," Vance wrote. "A week went by while the citizens of North Carolina suffered without the equipment and soldiers needed to save lives and begin recovery. This is the sort of bureaucratic hiccup that engaged political leaders solve. A competent leader would have ordered those men and women into motion earlier, bureaucracy be damned. Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden treated the situation like a public-relations disaster instead of a real one.
"Even the Obama administration was better at deploying assets in disaster zones."
Later in the column, after complimenting FEMA staff for "working hard," Vance said the agency has "been the victim of misplaced Biden-Harris political priorities."
"Under Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden, FEMA has funneled millions of dollars to nongovernmental organizations whose stated goal is facilitating mass migration into the U.S.," he wrote.
"The effort stems from a White House directive to reorient FEMA's institutional focus away from U.S. citizens and toward aliens who either have no legal right to be here or whose legal status depends on the say-so of the Biden-Harris administration."
Vance added that politics also have contributed to other FEMA actions.
"FEMA even seems to be picking winners and losers among the American people," he wrote. "In March 2023, FEMA hosted a panel titled 'Helping the LGBTQI+ Community Before Disasters: Preparedness and Mitigation Considerations.' Ordinary Americans of all backgrounds know that especially when it comes to disaster relief, federal agencies exist to serve all Americans, not to give some groups special treatment."