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House Republicans eye FEMA fund overhaul ahead of high-stakes hearing on Helene recovery

House Republicans eye FEMA fund overhaul ahead of high-stakes hearing on Helene recovery

A group of House Republicans is pushing to overhaul how funds are organized at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to more quickly get aid to communities devastated by Hurricane Helene. Rep. Gary Palmer, R-Ala., chair of the House GOP Policy Committee, is leading a new bill that would move unspent funds the agency has from the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as certain unspent funds earmarked for previous natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, into the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund. It comes just hours before the House Oversight Committee is set to hold a high-stakes hearing over accusations that FEMA aid was politicized. MIKE JOHNSON WINS REPUBLICAN SUPPORT TO BE HOUSE SPEAKER AGAIN AFTER TRUMP ENDORSEMENT “Millions of Americans were impacted by devastating hurricanes, and many are still seeking assistance and aid from FEMA to this day. Reports have now surfaced that a FEMA official recently instructed relief workers to avoid homes displaying support for President Donald Trump,” House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., said last week when announcing the hearing. “Not only are these actions by a FEMA employee completely unacceptable, but the committee remains deeply concerned that this is not an isolated incident at the agency.” Palmer’s bill is backed by a wide spectrum of GOP lawmakers, from House Freedom Caucus members, like Reps. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., and Byron Donalds, R-Fla., to more moderate Republicans, like Reps. Don Bacon, R-Neb., and Young Kim, R-Calif. It’s one of several solutions proposed in Congress to help get more immediate dollars to FEMA’s disaster fund.  MATT GAETZ FACES GOP SENATE OPPOSITION AFTER TRUMP SELECTION FOR ATTORNEY GENERAL FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told reporters on Monday that her agency “will need additional funding of approximately $40 billion beyond its 2025 budget request to support the ongoing recovery efforts to these storms and meet our overall mission requirements through the end of the fiscal year.” The White House also requested $98 billion in additional disaster relief funding from Congress. Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle have pledged to act swiftly once getting a formal request from the Biden administration. JOHNSON BLASTS DEM ACCUSATIONS HE VOWED TO END OBAMACARE AS ‘DISHONEST’ Helene ravaged part of the U.S. Southeast in late September, killing more than 100 people in North Carolina alone. It’s estimated to have caused billions of dollars worth of damage as well. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., previously told Fox News Digital that he believed it could be one of the most expensive storms in U.S. history. 

Trump naming cabinet officials at ‘warp speed,’ far head of first term pace

Trump naming cabinet officials at ‘warp speed,’ far head of first term pace

President-elect Trump appears to be a politician in a hurry when it comes to staffing his upcoming second administration’s top jobs. Trump has announced roughly 20 cabinet and other top level positions in the nearly two weeks since decisively winning the 2024 presidential election over Vice President Kamala Harris. The former and future president’s staffing pace is far ahead of where he was eight years ago, after his first White House victory. And he’s also making his picks at a quicker rate than President Biden following his 2020 election, and former President Obama 16 years ago. CLICK HERE FOR THE LATEST FOX NEWS REPORTING ON THE TRUMP TRANSITION One reason for the quick pace – unlike eight years ago when Trump and his top aides were relatively new to the process, this time they’re experienced hands. And this time around, Trump enjoys a larger national mandate, due to his sweeping Electoral College victory and his capturing of the national vote, which he didn’t accomplish in his 2016 White House win. GET TO KNOW TRUMP’S CABINET- WHO THE PRESIDENT-ELECT HAS PICKED SO FAR “He certainly knows the ropes and I guess in some ways, he kind of knows the dopes. He knows who he likes and knows who he doesn’t. He knows what he wants to accomplish,” Matt Mowers, a veteran Republican consultant and 2020 GOP congressional nominee in New Hampshire who worked on Trump’s 2016-2017 transition and served in the first Trump administration, told Fox News. Mowers noted that the clock’s ticking for Trump. “It shows that they recognize that with only four guaranteed years, they have to make an impact starting on day one. So it’s one of the reasons why they’ve chosen candidates at the speed he has and really started to announce policy at the speed he has – because they know they only have four years to really fundamentally guarantee a change of direction of the country based on what he campaigned on,” Mowers emphasized. DESANTIS SETS TIMETABLE FOR RUBIO REPLACEMENT IN THE SENATE Matthew Bartlett, another Republican consultant who also served at the State Department during Trump’s first term, told Fox News that “we are seeing the operation warp speed, that Trump is rapid fire naming cabinet and agency heads.” “Some of that is because he absolutely knows who he wants in place for his second term,” Bartlett said. “And it’s possible that some of it is because he is extemporaneously firing off names that are in his ear. So this looks like a mix of professionals and possibles.” But the past-face of announcements could potentially have a downside when it comes to the Senate confirmation of some of the more controversial picks by Trump. “The American people have an appetite, maybe even a demand, for a disruptor, but I’m not sure that they voted to see a destroyer as a cabinet secretary,” Bartlett said. And he predicted that some of the nominees “are going to go down” during the Senate confirmation process.

Why Trump is sticking with Gaetz, Hegseth despite new accusations – and his ‘Morning Joe’ meeting

Why Trump is sticking with Gaetz, Hegseth despite new accusations – and his ‘Morning Joe’ meeting

If you take a step back – make that several steps back – it’s easier to understand what Donald Trump is doing. Why would he deliberately ignite a media firestorm over such controversial nominees as Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth, and to a lesser degree with Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr.? The short answer is that the president-elect can’t run again and wants these nominees to disrupt – or even blow up – the departments they’d be in charge of running. And if they don’t have the usual credentials, if they’ve never run a large organization, he doesn’t give a damn. But wouldn’t it better serve his purposes to nominate equally disruptive Cabinet members who don’t have the baggage of a Matt Gaetz? But would they have the unquestioned loyalty? TRUMP, DEFYING MEDIA PREDICTIONS, MAINLY PICKS SEASONED CAPITOL HILL VETERANS SUCH AS MARCO RUBIO Even skeptical members of his inner circle have no choice but to let Trump be Trump.   If Gaetz were to become attorney general, for instance, he could fire FBI chief Chris Wray rather than Trump having to be the bad guy.  The thinking in Trump World is that the Senate won’t be able to reject more than two of his nominees. So even if Gaetz, who doesn’t appear to have the votes, is rejected, and perhaps Hegseth as well, everyone else gets through, including Kennedy and Gabbard. And wouldn’t it be hard for the Republican Senate, in the wake of such rejections, to be essentially obligated to approve the replacement nominees, given the magnitude of Trump’s victory? Is this 4-dimensional chess? White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was on the plane, with Gaetz, when Trump offered the now-former congressman the AG’s job. Whether Wiles, who ran a tightly organized campaign, knew about it or not, she had no power to stop it. Privately, some Trump advisers are opposed to the most radioactive picks, but they also know that the boss gets what he wants.   THE PODCAST CAMPAIGN: IS IT CURTAINS FOR MAINSTREAM MEDIA? The incoming Senate majority leader, John Thune, who’s not a Trump fan and was opposed by Trump, is deemed not likely to go along with recess appointments, which would be surrendering the chamber’s constitutional role of advise and consent. New reporting has complicated things for Gaetz and Hegseth, the decorated Army combat veteran and former Fox weekend host tapped to run the Pentagon.  The Washington Post scoop about Hegseth’s lawyer saying he paid off a female accuser who says he raped her in 2017, as part of a non-disclosure agreement, would sink a nominee under any other president. Hegseth, visibly intoxicated, says the encounter in his hotel room was consensual; the 30-year-old woman was at the conservative conference with her husband and small children. In the case of Gaetz, House Speaker Mike Johnson doesn’t want the ethics committee report released, since the man has resigned his seat. Does anyone doubt that if this was a Democrat, he would take the opposite stance and denounce the nominee as a pervert?   In any event, a lawyer for multiple women making accusations of sexual misconduct told ABC that two of his clients say Gaetz paid them for sex. And he plans more interviews. Attorney Joel Leppard said that in their House ethics testimony, staffers “essentially put the Venmo payments on the screen and asked about them. And my clients repeatedly testified, ‘What was this payment for?’ ‘That was for sex.’” . MEDIA LIBERALS SAVAGE KAMALA AS TRUMP PICKS EXPERIENCED HARD-LINERS Leppard had previously said that one of his clients had also watched Gaetz have sex with a minor. John Clune, another lawyer for a woman who contends that Gaetz had sex with a minor then in high school, called the Gaetz nomination “a perverse development in a truly dark series of events.” And as CNN noted, one of the underage girls says she had sex with Gaetz on an air hockey table, according to her testimony. One thing is certain: Trump continues to support both nominees. He is not going to back down. By the way, if Kamala Harris had won the election, I’d be scrutinizing her nominees the same way. A number of pro-Trumpers online accused me of Trump Derangement Syndrome for covering the most controversial nominees, which is hilarious because the president-elect granted me two interviews in 10 months, one just a couple of weeks before the election, and told me that both were fair. Meanwhile, Trump’s decision to meet with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who have relentlessly bashed him for the last seven years, was a brilliant move. Both made the request, and Trump was magnanimous enough to grant them an audience at Mar-a-Lago – really a stunning development. As they explained yesterday on “Morning Joe:” “We talked about a lot of issues, including abortion, mass deportation, threats of political retribution against political opponents and media outlets. We talked about that a good bit,” Scarborough said. “It will come as no surprise to anybody who watches this show, has watched it over the past year or over the past decade, that we didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues and we told him so.” ‘MORNING JOE’ CO-HOSTS HOLD FACE-TO-FACE MEETING WITH TRUMP FOR FIRST TIME IN SEVEN YEARS What they did agree on, Brzezinski said, “was to restart communications.” She noted that her father, the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, “often spoke with world leaders with whom he and the United States profoundly disagreed. That is a task shared by reporters and commentators alike. We had not spoken to Trump since March of 2020, other than a personal call that Joe made after the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania.” Trump was “cheerful and upbeat” and “seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues.” As for the expected liberal backlash for meeting with a man they’d described as a fascist, Mika turned it around: “Why wouldn’t we?” Trump later told Fox’s Brooke Singman:

Pennsylvania Dem Gov. Josh Shapiro sides with state supreme court ruling not to count certain mail-in ballots

Pennsylvania Dem Gov. Josh Shapiro sides with state supreme court ruling not to count certain mail-in ballots

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is siding with the state’s high court after the justices ruled that faulty mail-in ballots can’t be counted amid a contentious recount, delivering a victory to Republican Party officials. The state Supreme Court reaffirmed its prior decision in a 4–3 ruling Monday that counties cannot count incorrectly dated or undated ballots. The decision singled out the Boards of Elections in Bucks County, Montgomery County, and Philadelphia County, whom they said “SHALL COMPLY with the prior rulings of this Court in which we have clarified” for mail-in and absentee ballots in their Nov. 1 ruling. “Any insinuation that our laws can be ignored or do not matter is irresponsible and does damage to faith in our electoral process,” said Shapiro, a Democrat. “The rule of law matters in Pennsylvania. … It is critical for counties in both parties to respect it with both their rhetoric and their actions.” As governor, Shapiro said he would “continue working to protect our democracy and the votes of all eligible Pennsylvanians.” REPUBLICANS FILE 12 PENNSYLVANIA LAWSUITS IN ‘AGGRESSIVE’ PUSH TO END RECOUNT The high court initially ruled on Nov. 1 that mail-in ballots without formally required signatures or dates should not be counted. Democratic-led election boards, however — including in Philadelphia, Bucks County, Montgomery County, and Centre County — balked at the ruling and voted to include such ballots in the recount.  “People violate laws any time they want,” Democratic Bucks County commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia said last week, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. “So, for me, if I violate this law it’s because I want a court to pay attention. There’s nothing more important than counting votes.” Monday’s ruling came amid a slew of lawsuits filed by Republican Party officials in the midst of an aggressive Senate recount effort following the narrow victory of GOP candidate David McCormick over three-term Democrat Sen. Bob Casey.  ‘ABSOLUTE LAWLESSNESS’: GOP BLASTS PA. DEMS’ RECOUNT EFFORT IN CASEY SENATE LOSS McCormick had defeated Casey by some 17,000 ballots in the state, or within the 0.5% margin of error. The narrow victory allowed Casey to qualify for an automatic recount under Pennsylvania law. The Republican National Committee criticized Shapiro for not speaking up sooner in defense of the court’s actions.  “Heartening to see. Once Democrats came to the conclusion that even ignoring the Pennsylvania Supreme Court can’t scrape up enough ballots to win…,” RNC Chair Michael Whatley wrote on X. “Governor Shapiro suddenly discovers that he stands with the rule of law. Better late than never.” Trump campaign official Chris LaCivita said Pennsylvania elections officials would face jail time for counting incorrect mail-in ballots.   “They will go to jail,” he wrote Sunday evening on X. “Count on it.” Fox News Digital’s Breanne Deppisch contributed to this report.