Rep. Payne good morning. We are here to discuss the coronavirus also known as covid19. A moment to send my condolences to the American People who have lost loved ones during the crisis. We all know someone who has lost a loved one or someone close to us as well. Our condolences go out to the people. Specifically we are here to discuss the administration and femas response to the pandemic. As new states such jersey have been hit particularly hard. Im grateful to the fema employees i know are working hard to help us get through this. I think there is serious concerns about leadership coming from the white house during this pandemic as well as a need for greater level of transparency around new initiatives of fema. Joining me to discuss the administrations response, my colleague from the Home Security committee, val demings, representing florida and being a former First Responder herself, she is no stranger to disaster. Additionally we have a special guest online today, the former fema administrator under the Obama Administration, craig fugate. Before leaving fema, he headed the Florida Division of Emergency Management. Before that he worked in the Emergency Management and the local level in florida. With experience at the federal, state and local levels, there is not a better guess to discuss guest to discuss what is going on. The inside is important for the general public as well as us conducting oversight of the ,esponse which has been seen which has seen fema involved in the largest disastrous response of the age. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on some of these developments as well as where congress should focus their efforts to help boost femas response as well as provide agencysersight on the activities. Now i will recognize representative demings so she can give opening remarks. Rep. Demings good morning. Thank you again, mr. Chairman, for bringing us together for this critical and important discussion. Floridian fellow craig fugate, thank you for being with us today to try to determine where we are or have a discussion about where we are and more importantly where we need to go from here. I want to thank you for your service to florida and our country. Greg, on so many occasions, helped us prepare for the storms ahead and helped us to recover and restore after the disaster past. D. Passee we have a new storm that is big and deadly. I am concerned about the administrations response. I am concerned about local and state governments being able to get the help and resources that they need. We know that ima has a major fema has a major role to play. The Vice President said fema would coordinate the response activities. I look forward to assessing where we are in our response with a focus on transparency, coordination and necessary oversight. Thank you for bringing us together. Craig fugate, thank you for joining us. I yield back. You. Payne thank , i fugate, if you dont mind would like to jump in to questions. Actually, let me give you a few minutes just to give an overview of the response the you have seen it fema during this pandemic. Well, as anybody has watched when fema was placed in the job of helping coordinate all this, this goes back to the planning we did in the h1n1 pandemic, looking at sars and mers and then ebola. Fema would be a support agency to the centers for Disease Control and health and Human Services. We would bring the resources of fema to support them including logistics, things like the air bridge, which are things fema has done for other disasters. Is different to see fema it was different to see fema placed in the lead role. Femas job is, as the president directs, to coordinate crisis response. A lot of people thought fema would not be able to do i wont say it is easy but they are still responding to disasters. They are managing this through the key questions, what has worked but also more importantly , what do we need to do differently next time . We have a second wave being forecasted with covid19. Hurricane season is not going to be postponed. Need to get to the questions of what was working, codify and make sure we dont lose that. Also ask the question not so. Uch went what went wrong the better question is what do we need to do differently to prepare for the next pandemic, the next major disaster . Rep. Payne all right. Thank you for the assessment you, what issk your assessment of femas response to covid19 and what is the Agency Getting right and what are the avenues they need to improve . Mr. Fugate that is hard to say when you are not there. My observation early on was there were a lot of tools they had in the toolbox. Some have been utilized, some were utilized late like the defense production act. Others are programs fema, at the direction of the president , they can address some of the shortfalls. Like i said, fema cant manage what they dont have. Starting out late in the game with the National Stockpiles limited in what they could do and having to start the whole process of getting ppe moving, if you are going to use fema, you need to make the decision to use fema early. The delay put fema in a difficult position but also supporting governors behind where we could have been. You answer my followup question. I will yield the floor representative stomachs. Rep. Demings thank you so much,. R. Chairman you said it, and we all know it, Hurricane Season regardless of what is going on, Hurricane Season has not been canceled. As you know in florida, how critical it is for us to be as prepared as possible and able to effectively manage and juggle limited resources and staff to do everything. Could you talk to us about as we move closer and closer, we are about a month out from the start of Hurricane Season, how do you see femas role changing the response to the pandemic to ensure that we are ready . Something this is Emergency Managers from the state and local are looking at. How do we make social distancing . One of the powerful tools fema has, when we have a forecast is the hurricane declaration. In my administration we were very reluctant to turn results for just any storm. We look for significant impacts and look for from the role of assistance federal assistance. Fema, and thisge will be the president s decision , to support broader declarations including direct federal assistance and training to turn on the shelter programs we normally turn on after hurricanes hit. Getting people out of public shoulders. Shoulders. Public shelters. Part, we are not going to be able to move a lot of emergency workers around the country like we normally do. We see some examples in feeding the public right now that Many Organizations that are doing that are turning to local restaurants and hiring them to prepare meals. We need to look at all of our andent unemployed workforce that fema can reimburse states and local governments who hire people to feed them in the event of a disaster. Things like Contact Tracing with covid19. As we go into Hurricane Season, we need to be on the front end much more aggressive and encouraging programs to maintain social distancing but also the impact and not rely entirely responders,ers and which could be a challenge with social distancing and covid19. You also talked earlier about the resiliency of whatever deal with challenges are ahead. What do you believe some of the things that they should be, if they cant focus on them now because covid19, states should be thinking about now in terms of the resiliency moving forward, whether it is another pandemic or a Natural Disaster . What are those things to improve themstructure or to make more resilient . Moreugate we are seeing increasingly the impacts of climate disruption, rainfall, storms, heat waves. Opportunities we may have as a nation is to continue to invest in building resilient infrastructure and building for future risk. This will be one of the tools to help the economy is if we make investments in Construction Projects and put people back to work. We take a lot of aging infrastructure and start moving it to where we need to be to support communities and make it resilient to disasters. Thank you. Fugate, do think we will be able to continue the onse i think pretty much have answered that. Interestingit is what you say in reference to that. Nother issue is staffing that has been a challenge for fema. Doing told fema be boost morel and prevent [indiscernible] moraleate maintaining will always be a challenge in the federal government. I think fema is very much a Mission Driven agency. They will do a lot of work. My biggest concern is not getting them breaks. Regional staff that have been going almost nonstop with this, the same staff to coordinate on a large scale. I am less concerned about the total workforce. What we can do is we can hold the pull people off of major disasters. You take them off of the older disasters, may have to pause permanent work to get it stabilized. It is doable. Permanente construction, that is likely dont have enough people to employ. It is not easy but fema can do this. I think the other challenge is because all of the Training Centers have been shut down and the capabilities to train and do workforce has been impacted. Fema has been looking at doing training virtually. These are areas i would hope we would see support from congress to give fema more tools so we can hire and train people locally in areas after disaster and bring them up to speed in a lot of the program areas. It is doable, it is not easy but the biggest impact could be older disasters. We may have to hit pause to focus on the next disaster. Rep. Payne just to follow up in terms of to go to the upper level, other than the fema administrators, the top stops of fema that require information as well as many spots as Parent Department at dhs, what effect does that lack of leadership have on the response . Mr. Fugate it has two. The career folks are very capable. I got to the point at the end of the Obama Administration i was not asking for any new appointees. I liked my career staff day today. It has a negative. You dont have the political appointees, are you represented in the administration when decisions are being made . The career folks are outstanding and they are confident in what they do. If they are not at the table ,epresenting Agency Interest fema gets left out. It is a heavy burden for the administrator to do by himself. To have the team. You areit is critical appointing folks in those conversations and seen the career folks have been included but maybe not have the same weight the Senate Confirmed positions and political appointees have. Rep. Payne thank you. I yield to representative demings. Demings. Rep. Demings you mentioned the response to the h1n1 and ebola. You also of course i did out this is a Public Health crisis as those were. Fema has been given a leadership role in this response. What were some of the things that were in place during our response to those crises, if you will, that you believe worked and could be an official today, that we are not seeing . Mr. Fugate the first one was science led policy. We were in lockstep with Health Officials who were making recommendations. So in that administration, we were very much following the lead of our experts. The second thing was we early on identified protective equipment was going to be a key shortfall. The National Stockpiles were not designed for pandemics. They were designed for terrorism and very localized responses. In a pandemic they would serve as the initial push packages. Because so much of our health , theis made overseas defense production act would be a tool that would have to be considered early. The challenges which we saw which i saw in this response as well, when you need to do this, you may not have a lot of cases. We will get a lot of stuff we dont need. The problem was, and as we saw with this event, by the time you saw the numbers that would have justified doing it, you have lost too much time and it is too late. We need to think about that act fema and the department of defense are the executive offices for. Where weeate scenarios end up with too much stuff we wont need with that response, but not doing it creates the dynamics we dont, we cant catch up. We have also talked about transparency and oversight. I believe in situations like this. We didnt plan covid19, but we sort of expect the American People to deal with it, be strict smart and strategic and to do save as many lives as we can. Having been there during the administration of playing such a major and important role, how important is transparency, number one, how important is coordinated communication not just among the administration but also with the American People . Mr. Fugate some of the challenges we faced was lack of information. We were going to have shortfalls. We needed to be talking with the governors and telling them what we had, what we did not know. They may not always agree with our decisions, but they should know why we were making decisions and the challenges we faced. I found in those scenarios where we gave them the information and they understood why we were decisions, at least they understood. There has been a challenge in this event which has led to the challenges we have had. I figured it was better to give people the bad news up front than to not address it and have it come up in another form. Now we are dealing with more challenges because we did not tell people the bad news on the front end. Rep. Demings if i could ask one more question, mr. Fugate, the Pandemic Response team that was certainly part of the administration when you served, how important a role did they play in terms of coordinating our efforts and response . Mr. Fugate it was a team approach. President obama was a big believer in the whole of government that no one agency would have all of the answers. Using the National Security council as a cord knitting have come coordinating hub, we worked together on plans. But the medical experts in the federal government that would be leading the response, but it would incorporate all of the assets of Homeland Security and the department of defense. Other elements, including now as we are seeing more and more usda playing a role, food supply security. You want experts leading the response but dont want them doing it by themselves. You bring the whole team together. One of the things i was recognizing in the Obama Administration, we had crafted executive orders. The tendency to think of fema as only dealing with earthquakes and fires, Homeland Security act has given fema the responsibility to plan and coordinate any major crisis at the direction of the president. Because this is femas mission, it might be worthwhile to look at how to block this so we dont just have a stafford act declaration but bringing the tools fema can so hopefully next time they are brought in earlier, not after things are not working. Coordinate support for federal agency and then use tools, interagency relationships in all of the things we do responding to large complex events to support the lead agency, in the crisis. Rep. Demings thank you. Rep. Payne thank you, representative demings. Fema has yet to activate most of its individual assistance programs which provide direct services, aid to families, such as funeral assistance. What do you make of this and what do you think is the hold up on approving this assistance . Mr. Fugate fema cant add categories of assistance. It has to be directed by the president. Early on, prior to the cares act being passed, i thought fema should have looked at individual disasters, Disaster Unemployment , supplemental nutritional or food stamps, crisis counseling. Once we saw the fatalities start to increase, knowing many families would not have resources, add other areas like assistance. The cares act did create a challenge because there would be questions about duplication of benefits. Because femas programs are up and running and ready to go, they could have been utilized to buy time for the cares act and then after it was passed, sort that out. That was not done. There are aspects of that program that could be turned on, but fema doesnt have independent authority to do that. It is something the administration would have to do from the president. It is the capability even to execute. I dont think the funding would be a challenge for fema Given Congress has been supporting replenishing the Disaster Relief fund after major disasters and supported additional funds for fema and respond to covid19. One final question. That as themors white house is now turning its economy,reopening the i heard today on a different news show 21 states are loosening up their requirements. Fema is working to transition out of its role as the lead agency. Do you think that is right, the right timing for us which of its or jumping the gun . Mr. Fugate i dont think it is jumping the gun. The timing issue would have to be internal to see where things are at. This is no different from being asked by the white house about unaccompanied children. It is not the most primary mission. We are not a longterm solution to problems. We are the bridge between the crisis phase and the more Stable Recovery phase. As we are we we are reaching that point, it is not over and it will not be for some time, are we reaching the point where the more traditional responsibilities of health and Human Services can now be able to take over those roles and free fema up for other disasters . The timing will always be a question but the idea that ima as a Crisis Agency gets to a point where it is more of a and isrm response, appropriate to turn to another agency, that is another question. Timing not yet. Do we move prematurely and lose the rest ima has made . If we can transfer without losing, the timing is something to be looked at. Rep. Payne thank you, sir. One personal question. If a chief executive officer or a president in the future called on you to serve again, would you entertain it . Mr. Fugate he will have to ask my wife. You will have to ask my wife. [laughter] rep. Payne great answer. I want to give you a moment to offer any Closing Remarks or things you think the public should know that we have not covered through our questions. Mr. Fugate given everything that is being said, my only advice is listen to the medical experts and never for once think the fema people, the rank and file are not giving it their all trying to address this. This is new for all of us. Fema is learning. There will be mistakes made. Everything they are not doing Everything Possible to get this done and get ready for the next disaster. That,ayne thank you for and thank you for taking the to answer ourh us questions. Congresswoman demings and i appreciate your involvement. Very valuable insight for the community and general public. Close todaysll forum. Thank you for being a part of it. Mr. Fugate thanks for having me. Aboutcer 1 we will hear louisianas response to the covid19 pandemic at 3 30. John bel edwards will brief reporters. We will have that live on cspan. Primetime, journal a special evening edition of the washington journal on the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic. Our guest, and Infectious Disease position and professor at the University Physician and professor joins us to talk about the latest in Clinical Care for covid19 patients. Ato this author, looking pathogens like the coronavirus that can pass between humans and animals. Join the conversation tonight 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan. It was on the msnbc network the former Vice President and current democratic president ial presumptive nominee joe biden appeared to talk about sexual allegations. Here is a portion of that interview from this morning. The former senate aide accuses you of sexual assault. Pleaseto our viewers, excuse the graphic nature of this but i want to make sure there is no question as to what we are talking about. She says in 1993 you pinned her against the wall and reached under her clothing and penetrated her with your fingers. Would you please go on the record, did you sexually assault tara reade . It is not true. I have said unequivocally it never happened and it didnt. It never happened. Do you remember her . Do you remember any types of complaints she might have made . I dont remember any type of complaint she may have made. I dont remember