Watch MSNBC'S Chris Hayes debunk the “stone cold lie” being “spread by Fox News” about FEMA funding
Hayes: “There is no funding connection between shelter for migrants and funding for disaster relief. ... That's not me saying it, it's the Republicans in charge of the House Appropriations Committee in a fact sheet they shared yesterday with Chad Pergram"
Published
Citation From the October 9, 2024, edition of MSNBC's All in with Chris Hayes
CHRIS HAYES (HOST): And of course, the ultimate example of this is the big lie circulating about FEMA.
...
To be clear, it's not like one of these things where it's a matter of interpretation or a kernel of truth, it's an absolute lie. Stone cold lie started by Donald Trump, then spread by his running mate, his supporters on Capitol Hill, all the lackeys you saw there, Steve Scalise, the number two man in Congress, his supporters on Fox. The lie says that FEMA lacks the resources for disaster victims because it spent the cash on undocumented migrants. It is a lie that, as you just heard, was debunked by a Republican congressman from the affected area.
So, here are the facts. FEMA has enough funding in the short-term to address immediate needs for both Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. And there is no funding connection between shelter for migrants and funding for disaster relief. There is no intermingling of funds between these two programs.
That's not me saying it, it's the Republicans in charge of the House Appropriations Committee in a fact sheet they shared yesterday with Chad Pergram, the congressional reporter for Fox, because they felt the urgent need to push back on a lie that is being spread by Fox News and by Donald Trump. A lie started by their candidate for president, Donald Trump, and amplified, as you've seen, by his campaign surrogates, passed along on a social media site owned by the billionaire funding one of his super PACS.
Republicans who suddenly see a conflict between the welfare of their constituents and the toxic effect of their party's propaganda, and also don't want to fly back to Washington for an emergency session to fund FEMA when FEMA has money, now struggling to explain to their audiences that, well, up is up and down is down and water is wet and two plus two equals four.
And you can laugh at it when their disinformation was mainly just costing them votes in winnable elections like Georgia, but now it could cost lives in a massive complex disaster recovery. It is enraging that it took a crisis of these proportions to convince politicians, who politicized everything, that some government functions need to be above politics.