The Federal Emergency Management Agency has had to counter a surge of misinformation amid its disaster response to Helene.
Prominent Republicans have fueled these rumors. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) claimed the U.S. government is able to control the weather and has targeted predominantly GOP states. Trump falsely claimed the Biden administration is taking money from FEMA and using it to help immigrants vote illegally in the November elections. Trump also falsely claimed FEMA is only giving $750 to survivors of Helene.
FEMA braced for more misinformation this week as it prepared this for Hurricane Milton. But this time around, some Republicans are calling out members of their own party for spreading dangerous lies.
“NEW FLASH —> Humans cannot create or control hurricanes,” Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) wrote on social media on Wednesday, in response to Greene making this claim. “Anyone who thinks they can, needs to have their head examined.”
Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.) created a new fact sheet for Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee about FEMA’s disaster relief fund. It spells out that there is “no funding connection between” FEMA’s migrant shelter program and its disaster relief fund, rebutting Trump’s false claim.
The fact sheet also states that there is “no intermingling of funding between these two programs” and that “the only connection is that both programs are administered by FEMA.”
FEMA has been stepping up its efforts to counter all the bad information. It set up a page on its website, “Hurricane Helene: Rumor Response,” dedicated to countering unverified claims. North Carolina state officials set up a similar rumor-busting webpage of their own. And in their calls with the press, FEMA officials routinely debunk the latest rumors.
“That is absolutely not true,” Keith Turi, acting director of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, said Monday in response to the $750 claim being spread by Trump.
Turi also shot down false claims that FEMA is confiscating people’s possessions when it goes in to help disaster survivors, calling lies like this ”extremely damaging to the response efforts.”
| 