Monthly Archives: September 2024

With road deaths still stubbornly high following the pandemic, the Biden administration announced Thursday more than $1 billion in funding to help make the nation’s streets safer. The grants to local governments will help fund 354 safety projects around the country.

“We’ve been making a lot of announcements that make a lot of news at the Department of Transportation, but few could be as important as this one, because this really goes to the single main reason why our department exists, which is safety,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a call with reporters.

The list of projects funded through the grants include nearly $10 million to provide telemedicine services to emergency responders in rural Minnesota, $8.1 million for a new roundabout near the campus of Mississippi State University, and $25 million to add “complete streets” features—such as separated bike lanes, curb extensions, raised intersections and extra time for pedestrians to cross—to a major thoroughfare in Milwaukee.

Memphis Mayor Paul Young said a $13 million grant the Tennessee city is getting will help redesign the city’s most dangerous intersection in the Orange Mound neighborhood, a historically Black area. It is near a 15-acre park with a playground, ball fields, basketball courts, pavilions and a fitness trail. The six-way intersection “has a confusing array of signals leading to disjointed pedestrian activity and little guidance on appropriate movements,” Young said.

The city, which is contributing another $3 million to the project, will close one of the roads leading into the intersection. It will also upgrade traffic signals, pedestrian facilities and green spaces.

“This is a really big deal for the people of Memphis,” Young said, noting that Memphis was ranked the third-worst city in the country for pedestrian deaths in a 2022 analysis. “That, to me, is unacceptable. But we don’t have the funding that we need to make some of the more permanent changes to adapt the older street designs to comply with today’s safety standards.”

About 70 of the local governments receiving awards that were announced Thursday received money for construction and implementation. The rest received help for planning future projects.

“Many communities need support to get some of these projects onto the drawing board so that it’s possible for them to go to construction in the future,” Buttigieg explained. “So a lot of communities are now receiving federal funding to write the safety plans that will help to identify and address their most pressing needs, and as they do that, build out that pipeline of projects for the years ahead.”

The federal grant money comes through the Safe Streets for All grant program, which was created as part of the 2021 infrastructure law. The grants announced Thursday were the second round of funding distributed this year through the program; the next awards are expected to be announced in November.

The Biden administration has touted the reach of the program. In three years of Safe Streets for All grants, the U.S. Department of Transportation has awarded a total of $2.7 billion to more than 1,400 communities in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. Forty-eight tribal governments have received funding too. About half of the money has gone to rural areas.

According to the administration, the communities that have received the money account for 73% of the country’s population.

For more than half of the local governments receiving safe streets grants, the awards were their first direct transportation grants from the federal government. The Transportation Department provided technical assistance for many of them, including reaching out to 1,000 communities to help them fill out missing parts of their application. The agency also reached out to unsuccessful applicants from last year to help them better prepare for future submissions.

Traditionally, the federal government paid for road improvements by distributing money to state transportation agencies, which then decided how best to spend it. But Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said grant programs like the safe streets initiative allow local leaders to have a bigger say on improving their road networks.

“We’ve heard time and again how important it is to local communities to have direct access to federal funding,” he said. “I wish when I was mayor that we had had a way to fund safety improvements like this with federal dollars. … No one knows better what a community’s needs are than the local leadership and the membership of that community.”

“None of the projects we fund were invented at the DOT headquarters in Washington; they emerged from the communities,” he added. “The ideas don’t come from us, but the funding needs to. We think that direct line to local communities is especially important for getting visions done that just wouldn’t make the cut through any other funding source.”

When President Joe Biden nominated Deanne Criswell to serve as the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2021, she received a unanimous confirmation, a rare gesture of bipartisan support from the bitterly divided U.S. Senate. A longtime firefighter who served overseas in the Colorado Air National Guard, Criswell also had decades of emergency management experience not just with FEMA, but in local emergency response leadership roles in Colorado and New York City.

Criswell knew how the system worked at FEMA, but her mandate was to change the status quo at an agency that is often accused of acting too slowly after disasters — and of being far too slow to adapt to climate change. In her three years leading the agency, she has attempted to overhaul FEMA’s disaster aid programs, overseen billions of dollars in new spending on forward-looking adaptation projects, and navigated tough disputes over the rising cost of insurance and reconstruction in vulnerable areas. Her goal was not just to ensure that FEMA ran well during disasters but also to shift the agency’s culture, making it more responsive to survivors’ needs and more forward-looking about disaster preparedness.

With peak hurricane season approaching, Grist sat down with Criswell to discuss how she’s handled some of FEMA’s biggest challenges and how she’s attempted to transform the agency from the inside. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q. Among communities that get hit with a lot of disasters, FEMA has a reputation for slowness and bureaucracy. From your perspective, after both working here and being a FEMA customer, how much of that is merited?

A. We’ve heard that a lot, and I think that there’s a lot of people that still have memories of Hurricane Katrina — they think of the FEMA of today as the FEMA from Katrina. We are a different team. We respond faster. We have more resources for recovery. We have more resources to help reduce impact, more resilience programs. We know that recovery is really complicated, and some communities are more complex than others. But recovery is doable, and so what we have to do is work with a community to understand what their recovery needs are. We have these integrated recovery teams that go in and don’t just implement FEMA programs, but they help bring the whole space — federal agencies, philanthropies, and nonprofits — together to help identify what that community’s recovery goals are and help them with that complicated road to recovery. While I think some of [the criticism] is warranted at times, I think that we are a very different agency than we were after Katrina, and we’re making huge gains. 

Q. Earlier this year, FEMA unveiled a set of reforms to its individual assistance programs, cutting red tape and offering survivors more money for food and housing after disasters. These reforms address many of the longest-standing complaints and criticisms about how that program works. Why didn’t this happen earlier?

A. We’ve been working on that since the day that I came into this office. I think this really came about through hearing from the people that are trying to get assistance and the struggles and the barriers that they’re facing. I’ve been a local emergency manager in a small community in Colorado. I’ve been a local emergency manager in New York City. So I know what it’s like to be a customer of FEMA. In my very first year, I visited a lot of our joint field offices to hear from people and hear some of the challenges that they were facing. 

I think that lens helps us keep it at the top of our priority list, and helps us keep focused on putting people first, and always trying to understand their barriers, and knowing that we can’t just have a one-size-fits-all approach to the delivery of our programs. So I think a lot of it really has to do with the fact that we’ve had a lived experience of being on the other side.

Q. FEMA’s resilience programs allocate billions of dollars to climate adaptation and disaster preparedness. But a large share of the money from programs like Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC, goes to white and wealthy areas, and there are a few “superuser” states that get a lot of the money. I’m wondering what FEMA has done or could still do to address those disparities.

A. When I came in, the first round of BRIC money was going out. Under a previous resilience program, there was a cap of $5 million federal spending, and BRIC gave us a $50 million cap, so people were really excited. But we saw from the first round that the structure that we had put in place was certainly not representative of all communities across America, and it really seemed to favor some of our coastal communities. So every year we have made adjustments to ensure everybody has a fair chance in the competitive side of the program. We have direct technical assistance, which is also making a big impact — bringing in experts, especially for our most under-resourced communities that don’t necessarily have the expertise or the personnel or the time to be able to think about the next mitigation [project] that they can do. We continue to expand that every year. 

What I’ve asked my team to do now is to study the return on investment of resilience projects to see what’s working. We want to see projects succeed, and sometimes we see projects that don’t get across the finish line because of a poor start. We’ll continue to refine the way that we are scoring these projects to ensure that communities that have the greatest need can get some of the benefit — for instance we’re adding points to the score for new applicants, or if you’re in a [vulnerable area].

Q. In response to protests from environmental groups and cities such as Phoenix, which have criticized FEMA for not responding to heat waves, FEMA has said that it can only declare a disaster when state and local financial resources are exceeded. But few communities apply for heat disaster declarations because it’s difficult to show how heat waves overwhelm local finances. Do you think FEMA can or should modify its threshold for declaring a heat disaster? And if it did, what could FEMA do to help residents during a heat wave? 

A. I’m going to start with the preparedness side. We know heat comes every year, just like we know hurricanes come to the Gulf Coast and the East Coast every year. So the individual preparedness piece is really important, and we can’t negate that. We need people to know what their risk is, know what kinds of severe weather events are going to impact them, and what their personal needs are. If I know that I have a condition that makes me more vulnerable to heat, what am I going to do during extreme heat days if my power goes out? We also can help reduce the impact through our mitigation programs — we’ve got many communities that are using BRIC funding to plant tree canopies to reduce the impact from urban heat islands, or painting roofs white, or putting in place splash pads for kids. That reduces the overall impact.

But let’s go into emergency response. I was working in New York City during COVID, and we were very concerned about the number of people that didn’t have air conditioning and the fact that we didn’t want to put them in congregate settings. So New York City utilized money [from the federal housing department’s home energy assistance program LI-HEAP] to put air conditioners in people’s homes. From a cost perspective, if that was a disaster declaration, could FEMA have reimbursed the city for the air conditioners that they put in? I don’t know. Perhaps, but it also takes other agencies, right? We need a whole-of-government solution to help these communities. 

I think about what happened in Houston with Hurricane Beryl recently, and the power outages. What could we or could we not do there? We could use some of our programs to perhaps help individuals that are vulnerable make sure that they have a place to go, like a cooling center, or if it’s a long period of time and they have to relocate somewhere, perhaps our programs could help there. We are not opposed to having a state come in and ask for a heat declaration. I just need to know what I’m reimbursing them for that isn’t part of their normal budget. Some of the things that I read are like, “We want FEMA to be able to pay for cooling centers.” Well, I don’t like the phrase “pay for a cooling center” because it makes it sound like I’m building something brand new, and really I’m just opening up the library, or I’m having people go to the library.

Q. Since Hurricane Ian struck Florida in 2022, I’ve heard from people trying to rebuild in Lee County that rising flood insurance costs are prohibitively expensive and rebuilding a house to code is really, really costly — so much so that a lot of people just can’t afford it. To what extent is that the intended outcome of these programs — to discourage this kind of waterfront living? How much is this something that you think FEMA or Congress should try to address through affordability mechanisms?

A. I get asked all the time, “Should we let people rebuild there?” And in some areas, I say probably not, and that’s why we have programs to help buy people out and move. But most of the time it’s not a matter of where, it’s a matter of how. When we look at what’s going on in Lee County right now, we don’t want people to rebuild and put their lives at risk. It’s not just about how much it’s going to cost to rebuild that home: During Hurricane Ian, 150 people lost their lives. They were in homes that weren’t elevated high enough, or they chose not to evacuate. 

So this is about not just the cost of rebuilding, but also about: How are we doing everything we can to protect the lives in an area that’s prone to a severe weather event? This is about protecting lives and saving the people that live in those areas, and people will have to make personal choices about whether or not this is the right location for them to live based on what that’s going to require. 

But to your last point about affordability [of flood insurance], we do believe that there are certain communities across the U.S. that are certainly in an area that is at high risk, but they came to be there through an environmental injustice — they’re low-income neighborhoods, but they’re at a high risk, and so their costs are really high. So we do believe an affordability plan is needed to ensure that people can get the type of protection that they need. But we also know that we have homes that are high value and high risk, and we were subsidizing their rates prior to this.

Q. For the second year in a row, FEMA has run low on money and Congress has not acted to replenish its budget. As a result, the agency has once again had to implement “immediate needs funding,” which means it has paused almost all its recovery and resilience projects and restricted spending only to emergency response operations. With peak hurricane season approaching, what’s the realistic worst-case scenario here, and what can FEMA do about it without action from Congress?

A. We’ve done immediate-needs funding in the past, but it has usually been after a major weather event has caused us to expend the funds that we have. What we’re finding right now is, as we close out COVID-19 [reimbursements], all of those bills are coming in. We always want to make sure that we have enough funding to support immediate responses to big incidents like Hurricane Ian, and we go into immediate needs when I reach a balance that’s going to allow me to respond to one of those events. That’s where we’re at now.

On the response side, I keep enough money to respond to one event. As we were watching Hurricane Debby, I was really concerned, because it was going to hit Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and then on up. If it had materialized as we thought it might, that could have drained the rest of the money that I have available very quickly. There’s not much that I can do other than getting a supplemental [appropriation] from Congress, and I have walked the halls of Congress to make sure that they know really where we’re at — once I have that one big event, or maybe two events coming back to back, I’m going to have to come back to them, and they may have to act faster than they’ve planned.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/extreme-weather/deanne-criswell-biden-fema-interview-flood-insurance/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

A coterie of House Republicans introduced new legislation on Friday to provide supplemental funding to help cover a budget shortfall at the Veterans Affairs Department through the end of the month.  

The Veterans Benefits Continuity and Accountability Supplemental Appropriations Act — cosponsored by House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., committee members Mike Garcia, R-Calif., Judge Carter, R-Texas, David Valadao, R-Calif., and House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Chairman Mike Bost, R-Ill. — would provide the VA with an extra $2.89 billion to cover additional costs at the Veteran Benefits Administration.

“This isn’t just about a funding shortfall—it’s about holding the administration accountable for its failures. We cannot simply throw more money at a broken system and enable further waste and mismanagement,” said Garcia, the lead sponsor, in a statement. “My bill is focused on both ensuring our veterans receive the care they’ve earned and demanding accountability from those in charge.”

The supplemental funding is meant to cover the fiscal 2024 portion of a projected $15 billion shortfall expected between now and fiscal 2025. VA officials informed the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee of the shortfall in July, saying that it was tied to compensation and pension, as well as readjustment benefit costs originating out of the VBA.

VA officials also projected a potential $11.97 billion shortfall in fiscal 2025 due to rising hiring and pharmaceutical costs. 

After the Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act expanded VA benefits eligibility for veterans with 23 respiratory illnesses related to burn pits used by the military, VA began ramping up hiring efforts, including 61,000 new hires at the VHA in fiscal 2023,  to be able to manage a growing influx of patients and beneficiaries.  

But in January, Government Executive learned that portions of the VA network had been limiting hiring to cover budget shortfalls, with some deploying “‘cost avoidance strategies’ that included ‘strategic hiring/onboarding,’ overtime reductions, travel limitations and other efforts.”

In a July 17 letter to VA Secretary Denis McDonough, Bost put the shortfall blame squarely on the Biden administration and its handling of the PACT Act influx.

“The budget shortfall seems to be a troubling mix of anticipated costs that were not budgeted for and other costs that lack sufficient explanation or are speculative. For example, although compensation and pension obligations have been running below expectation so far this fiscal year, it is well understood that claims submissions have increased due to the PACT Act and this year’s rulemakings, that disability examinations increase with the volume of claim submissions and contentions, and VBA typically experiences a surge in obligations near the end of the fiscal year,” he said. “Similarly, the annual increase in community care obligations has been fairly constant in percentage terms since fiscal year 2022, but the Biden-Harris administration has declined to include community care growth in its base budget request for VA while seemingly straining, if not breaking, the limits of what the Toxic Exposures Fund can pay for.”

Friday’s legislation would cover the VBA deficit from unappropriated Treasury funds, but also require McDonough to provide a report to relevant House and Senate committees within 30 days of enactment detailing what corrections the VA will take to better forecast its budget requirements for compensation and pension and readjustment benefit costs. 

Within 60 days, the VA would have to provide a report to relevant House and Senate committees on the status of the requested funding for fiscal 2024, 2025 and 2026 that will be updated every 90 days until Sept. 30, 2026. 

The VA inspector general would also examine the underlying cause of both the VBA and VHA shortfalls and report to the relevant committees within 180 days under provisions in the bill. 

The Merit Systems Protection Board is set to both propose and implement new rules aimed at making it easier for the agency to maintain operations in situations where the adjudicative body atop the agency lacks a quorum.

For a period of five years from 2017 through 2022, the MSPB lacked a quorum, preventing the agency that hears appeals of adverse personnel actions in the federal government from issuing decisions and hamstringing other operations. The extended absence of Senate-confirmed appointees atop the agency led to a record backlog of 3,500 cases when lawmakers finally OKed the nominations of two board members in March 2022.

But at least some of the hangups that the agency encountered during its half-decade rudderless period will no longer be a problem if the agency goes without Senate-confirmed leadership. That’s because an interim final rule slated for publication in the Federal Register Monday updates the agency’s internal operating procedures to allow some actions to take place without a quorum.

“During the board’s inquorate status between 2017 and 2022, the board encountered numerous scenarios which under existing regulation or policy required board vote, but which were unable to be processed without a quorum,” MSPB wrote. “These included scenarios such as decisions finalizing settlements of appeals reached after an initial decision had issued, or requests for further development of the record by an administrative judge after an initial decision had issued. The board is implementing this modification in order to expedite processing in certain scenarios in the event that it is again unable to act due to a loss of quorum in the future.”

Under the new regulations, a lone board member would be able to tackle some of this work, and in the absence of any Senate-confirmed MSPB member, staff can work on these matters “to the limited extent necessary to facilitate final decision-making by a future quorum.”

Though the new rules’ most notable changes are in response to the MSPB’s years-long time without permanent leadership, the filing is the culmination of an effort that began in 2019 to review all of the agency’s internal regulations. As such, there are number of other minor changes to the agency’s internal operations included as well, including stipulating that examples listed within the agency’s regulations are “illustrative” examples, rather than binding interpretations of policy, clarifying when an MSPB’s decision becomes final, as well as simplifying how agency staff can process petitions for review of adverse personnel actions.

Though the rule will take effect on Oct. 7, MSPB officials are still encouraging members of the public to weigh in via a 60-day comment period.

“While these amendments are being issued immediately as interim final rules, the board still requests that all stakeholders or other interested individuals provide their views on the amendments,” the agency wrote. “The board also requests additional comments on any other aspect of its regulations that stakeholders or other interested individuals feel need amending. The board will thoroughly consider all input and respond to all comments as necessary.

The controversy will continue over when presidents might be considered above the law. But it should be undisputed that the millions of employees in the executive branch never are. And from what I see as the head of the independent agency designated by Congress to protect them, they don’t want to be. 

Instead, what government workers and lawmakers count on is a cycle of accountability and protection: federal employees should be hired based on merit, report wrongdoing when they see it, and be safeguarded from retaliation when they blow the whistle on misconduct.

The agency I lead, the Office of Special Counsel, helps police the cycle. Federal workers come to OSC with allegations of government misconduct and, if we determine there is a “substantial likelihood” that the disclosure indicates lawbreaking or certain other wrongdoing, then I ask the agency in question to investigate and report back. My colleagues and I assess the report, provide the whistleblower a chance to comment, and share it and our take with the president, Congress, and the public.

Here’s the problem: a process Congress envisioned taking a couple of months is too often taking years. 

And worse: until the very end, no one outside my agency and the agency being investigated knows anything about what’s going on. 

Today, I am proposing a new policy where, with the consent of the whistleblowers who first flagged the possible misconduct, we will provide public notice about the allegations being investigated.

Specifically, OSC would post summaries of whistleblower allegations where my colleagues and I have made a “substantial likelihood” of agency wrongdoing determination. These summaries would be for open matters where I await final agency reports detailing their findings and fixes. 

And we propose doing something similar on the employee protection side. When OSC sees evidence indicating that whistleblower retaliation or some other prohibited personnel practice has occurred, and the agency is not timely and reasonably responding to the injured employee, we would say something quickly and publicly whenever the wronged worker agrees.

These proposals for greater transparency and urgency may be new but they are intended to fulfill directives from Capitol Hill. When it comes to “substantial likelihood” of wrongdoing investigations, the expectation Congress enshrined in the law is that agency heads will issue findings within 60 days after receiving a referral from OSC. My agency would not post a summary of an allegation until then.  If an agency asks for more time before issuing the required report, OSC will agree when reasonable. But the summary of the allegation will be available to all while my agency and the public waits. That’s because I think people have a right to know what might be going wrong inside the government they pay for and be assured that serious allegations are being taken seriously and investigated expeditiously.

When it comes to redressing retaliation, discrimination, nepotism, and other acts that violate the merit-based and positive work environments federal employees are guaranteed, Congress has made clear it wants my office to focus on getting any inflicted harm undone as quickly as possible. The legal term used is “corrective action” and the phrase is mentioned no less than 20 different times in the statute OSC helps enforce. 

So before posting a summary of the workplace misconduct, OSC would give agencies a short window of time to agree to correct unlawful actions. But if a quick resolution fails, OSC is ready to make public a summary of its view that it appears a federal worker has been unlawfully mistreated. 

And in cases where OSC believes an agency may be in the process of a wrongful employment decision, – firing or suspending a whistleblower for example – we want the agency to hold off (in legal terms, stay the action) until my office can make a final determination as to whether the adverse consequence is justifiable or, instead, retaliatory. If an agency doesn’t heed our advice and we have to ask the Merit Systems Protection Board to step in, I want to start making our legal briefs public at the same time we file them with MSPB.

While I hope summaries can be posted in most if not all ongoing matters where OSC believes agency misconduct or employee mistreatment may have occurred, there could be situations where it would be against the whistleblower’s interest or the public interest to say anything publicly until the matter is resolved. If that’s the case, my office will do everything in its power to bring the case to a fast conclusion so that details on what the outcome was, and why, can be safely revealed.

While the steps proposed here will shine a light on other agencies, OSC will provide more visibility into our own operations. My colleagues and I are finding ways to make our policies and protocols more transparent and we’ll be posting them in the weeks ahead at www.osc.gov. One practice that will be explained is why OSC is now insisting that agency heads personally review and sign their reports to my agency or, at a minimum, provide a clear statement that they are aware of and agree with the findings.  

And soon after the start of the new federal government fiscal year on Oct. 1, I will make an announcement about which aspects of this proposal OSC will put into official effect.

The question of when presidents can be criminally prosecuted should not be confused with the obligation of federal agencies to follow the rules. Congress and common sense tell us the same thing: when you execute the law as a government employee, you must follow the law. When that doesn’t happen, I believe the fix should occur as soon as possible. And the process should be as public as possible. These goals – greater transparency and faster accountability – are the catalysts for this proposal.

Hampton Dellinger heads the Office of Special Counsel. He was confirmed by the Senate to a five-year term earlier this year.