Transcripts For CSPAN Washington Journal Craig Fugate 20240712

Watch quote washington journal 7 00 eastern tuesday morning. Join the discussion with your phone calls, facebook comments, Text Messages and tweets. Continues. Host we are joined next by former federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator craig fugate. Thank you for being with us on washington journal this morning. Guest thanks for having me. Host a number of items on our plate including the covid19 response. First, to the response to hurricane laura. The hurricane coming effectively the same week marking 15 years since hurricane katrina. What lessons do think fema and the federal government learned in terms of response to hurricanes in particular . Guest i think the biggest lesson was that we dont wait until we are asked to start getting ready. To be ana, there seem lot of confusion about the governor having to make requests and what femas role was going to be. Congress, after katrina launched substantial legislation. Governors are going to be is he dealing with this. The federal government doesnt have to wait. We start moving resources and i think you see this response has increased. We are not waiting for these assessments. You talked about states being prepared and fema being prepared, but what about individuals . Do you think u. S. Households are better prepared than they used to be to handle things during a Natural Disaster . Guest we get better at some things and not as good in others. If you look at what has happened in hurricane laura, we were fortunate. There seem to be very low lossoflife due to the impacts of the storm. A lot of people heated the evacuations even in the time of covid. Unfortunately, we have seen a lot of deaths associated with Carbon Monoxide due to improper use of generators. We have to continue to increase the lessons we learned. Even after a hurricane, it can be dangerous and deadly for people in the recovery process. One headline says calamity visits again. Last week, the whole hurricanes shaped up to be a onetwo punch. It didnt work out necessarily, but there were two major storms hitting the gulf coast. In your experience, have you ever seen a season as busy as this in terms of hurricanes . Guest so far, yes. Florida got hit with four hurricanes in 2004. In 2005, we were using the greek alphabet. We are not even in the peak of the Hurricane Season. We still have a long ways to go, but it has been very active so far. Laura, aular, with very early hurricane. Oft the former director fema talking about response to hurricanes, covid19 pandemic and wildfires. We welcome your comments. One line for those of you in the eastern and central time zones, one in mountain and pacific. What does your organization do . Guest basically, policy and communication. We do a lot of work in the flood space talking about how to look at flood policy going forward. Our National Flood insurance program. It has a lot of challenges, but more importantly, as we continue to see increasing flood risk, we still see a lot of folks who dont have flood insurance. We see that a lot of our infrastructure isnt keeping up with increased flooding risk. Host an covid19 response, what was femas role as one of the lead agencies and responding to the pandemic . Guest it changed. Our plans in planning for pandemics is based upon what we have learned with h1n1 and ebola was that fema would play a role, but it would be a supporting role to the lead agency, which would be services. As task was consequent concentrating on the consequences of the pandemic. We saw early, it seemed that was not what the plan was going to be. Fema was put into the role of coordinating a lot of the resource requests to this. That put fema into an area that it had done a lot of resources, but these were resources it didnt have a lot of experience with. There was a period there with both hyper demand as well as fema having to literally play catch up to the resource requests. Host youre talking about personal protective equipment and things like that . Guest everything from the ventilators. Probably the biggest thing we identified as one of the big shortfalls was the ppe, particularly, the medical grade n95 masks. Had seen this previously with ebola and others on a much smaller scale. We knew ppe was going to be one of the items that in a pandemic, was going to be in huge demand. I think that is one of the challenges. No one really thought about how big the number was going to be about how much you needed. It seemed like everybody was grabbing whatever they could to try to meet the demands of what was occurring. Host what was on the books in terms of that response and plan . How much to the federal government have stockpiled or should have had stockpiled in preparation for Something Like this . Guest the National Stockpile was never designed for a pandemic. They were designed for point specific disasters, bio tax, something geographically limited. We really look at the National Stockpile as a pushback. When dealing with a pandemic, ideally, you would contain a and have a few cases or areas being hit and that would be a geographically based response. It also meant that if we didnt get containment, things like the defense production act had to be evoked early to start folks prioritizing and coordinating additional production of ppe, most of which was overseas, and looking at how you would increase Domestic Production while maximizing again, every country was competing for these resources. Without Domestic Production capability, we fell behind and it was difficult to get caught back up. Our lines are regional. On that defense production act, the president was called on to use that for production of essential material. Do you think the administration should have acted sooner on that . Or acted more broadly in implement thing that act . Where we are at now, it is an easier question to answer. We should have turned it on earlier. It is a huge impact on disrupting supply chains. In many cases, you are not sure how much you are going to need early on. By the time you know you need it, it is usually too late. One of the lessons i think we are going to come out of this is how do we increase Domestic Production of some of this ppe, how much we should maintain the stockpile and what is the best way to leverage the defense production act when youre not sure how bad it could be. Host doesnt a little bit kobach to the individual and family preparation for these sorts of things in relation to hurricanes . Guest again, when we were talking about originally, the whole issue with covid19, it was a novel virus, which meant we had never experienced it before and would constantly learn. We started out with social distancing and washing our hands, and then we added masks. We have learned this is a fairly significant airborne threat. That ability to provide those supplies, in the beginning, was very short. Now that we are starting to get to the point that we have enough, it is important that people wear a mask in their Outdoor Activities when they are meeting other people enclosed spaces. Wearing we maintain masks and social distancing, the slower the outbreak is spreading. Host lets go to calls and hear first from gary in east brunswick, new jersey. Go ahead. Caller thank you very much for picking up. I am 82 years old. I live in east brunswick, new jersey. I want to complement the mayor of east brunswick. He is a physician and a great mayor and a great leader. I want to also thank the Police Brunswick and the Emergency Management coordinator. I spent 50 years and the health care field. On the editor of a textbook in that field. And the editor in chief and founder of a journal. I have to complement these men for the outstanding jobs they have done during not only the pandemic, but also the storms a couple weeks ago. The leadership, one of the great mayors of the county of middlesex in the state of new jersey, active in the board of education, an elected official and now the city mayor of east brunswick, knows exactly what to do together with the Emergency Management coordinator who has been one for 38 years. I, myself, have bought masks from the pharmacy and give them support people, given them to small retail shops. I also am the one that called the Governors Office of the state of new jersey on april 1 and told the secretary and the state Health Administrator if the governor does not issue and a proclamation to wear a mask, i will call the Community Called diseases center, which he did issue with a few days later and his office called me and then, i called safe in shoprite and told them if they didnt shutdown the salad bars, there will be a price to pay. Host i will let you go. Guest again, we are seeing across the country, the pandemic reached to every community. It wasnt uniform. This has moved into rural america, middle america. What started out being an east coast and west coast epicenter has spread. Unfortunately, we have seen some areas do very well and be aggressive in our measures. Other areas didnt seem to have the same leadership or desire to do some of these things. Their cases skyrocketed. Concord north in carolina, republican line. Go ahead. Caller i was just wanting to know when he thinks about the cdc coming out and saying 94 of the virus was misrepresented. They are saying only 6 had the virus and they have made that public. And how it has changed to the world. I just dont understand that. The cdc. Made that clear. 94 were misinterpreted. So far, the medical establishments and looking at how they are counting deaths, over 180 thousand people have died of the virus. That is more than we have seen from a lot of other causes. Average loss of life from traffic crashes every year is about 50,000. We know that covid doesnt affect everybody the same. Supery cases, we have the spreaders who are not even displaying symptoms. The mortality rate for covid is significant for those that do have conditions. And in some cases, even young people and children, we are seeing deaths associated or related to the covid infection. A line for those of you in the eastern and central time zones. And pacificmountain time zones. Our guest is craig fugate. On the wildfires in california, wildfires stretch capacity showing the number of acres burned in 2020 and still early in the season at fairly record levels. It is sort of a triple punch here with the fires out west, Hurricane Season still well underway and the pandemic still going on. Of fema ever faced the sort crises on multiple fronts like this before . Guest not with the pandemic. Hurricanealt with season and wildfires coexisting at the same time, but a lot of what fema does is in support of our states. I think there is a tendency to think that fema is the only organization tourist bond. Two respond. Host we go to our independent. Ine caller the collins are east coast, west coast and text. I am an independent. , in regards becomes to covid19 and storm threats. Back in 1938, there was a massive storm that came up the east coast. Had the best scenario for the where a bermuda high dropped and spinning clockwise and another front spinning counterclockwise that pushed the storm 55 miles an hour up and hit up in vermont as a category one. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, there was another storm that had the exact same. It jumped into the carolinas, but 24 hours later the jetstream in and 24 hours later, the bermuda high have dropped down and you could have had an identical effect to the 1938 storm. If you had a catastrophic storm, such as in 1938, which could have repeated itself, with the covid19 preparations, along with such a catastrophic storm hitting long island and destroying long island, because it was all Agricultural Land back then, would fema be able to handle that . Again, fema is just part of the team. When you get into high population areas, there is a lot of challenges but also a lot of resources from state and local governments. He brought up a point that in dealing with covid and hurricanes, we are going to have to look very carefully on making sure people understand the risk from hurricanes is primarily water. If you look at the Hurricane Center data and looking back at storms over centuries, the leading cause of death is drowning or water related trauma. We want to remind people that if you are in a evacuation zone, the biggest risk is going to be drowning and water related traumas. We stony people to evacuate even in the era of covid. The reason we think the loss of laura was low was the number of people who did he the evacuations and moved inland. The most important thing to remember is that covid is bad, drowning is worse and we need people to evacuate if their communities are threatened by these hurricanes. Host i think we started out by saying the number of deaths was around 15 or 16 mainly from Carbon Monoxide poisoning. Guest this is something i really saw in florida in the 2004 hurricanes. We had more deaths after the storms then we did from direct impacts. Things like generator safety. A lot of times, people just dont use generators. They forget that generators produce Carbon Monoxide. We remind people to keep those things far away from your house. Dont put them in your garage and dont run them in your home. Make sure the exhaust is pointed away from the house. The problem with Carbon Monoxide is that it is odorless and deadly and often one of the most common events we have seen with generators. Improper placement and running those generators when Carbon Monoxide gets into the home. Host lets hear from the gulf coast. Caller thank you for taking my call. Im talking about fema, the storms and the fires that have been going on and coronavirus. I dont blame that on our president. I blame it on the president s that were in office way before us. They could have caught onto all of that in time. It was like the election is and donald trump and obama and allowing them to come over. It wasnt his fault, it wasnt nobody elses fault but the government. It is like i said, ive been fighting with the government for years over fema. I lost three trailers, three vehicles. I didnt get nothing back because i didnt have no address. What do you do about that . You cant keep fighting them. So what do you do . I believe donald trump has done more for us than obama. Host did you lose these trailers in one particular storm or where these several different incidents . Caller storms. Im still fighting it. It is like i said, i cant get no help down here because the way it is with the Justice Department and fema, if you dont have a current address or a permanent address and it was my permanent address, it was just my name wasnt on the box. Host we will let you go there. Any thoughts . Guest this was something we have run into before where we have had people who are impacted because of oftentimes passing property down. We basically came up with a way to work around that so we could help folks. Generally, if we can make it work, we do. Isetimes the challenge getting help the people that need it versus making sure that there is not fraud in other circumstances. If that is a legitimate complaint, hopefully that is something we could figure out how to do. The goal wasnt to keep you from getting assistance, it was to get assistance to as many people as possible. Host the New York Times has a piece on hurricane laura. They write in the working class neighborhoods in and around lake charles, louisiana, how difficult the path ahead would be became clear. The storm inflicted was so severe that it will be an immense undertaking just to clear debris. Beyond the physical labor, residents were also stepped into the thicket of bureaucracy with insurance claims and application for government aid. Inspectors surveyed more than 200 damaged homes and issued more than 650,000 in assistance. Is that pretty typical in terms of this be the reaction of officials in issuing that assistance to folks that have had damage . Guest you could have written that article about a halfdozen hurricanes i have been involved in. Is aftermath of the storm bureaucracy you have to wade through. One of the challenges i had was trying to reorient. We have so many moving parts, whether we have insurance. Fema says it is based upon a demonstration of needs. Congress did not intend that fema would be the first payee. At, do you you look have insurance, do you qualify for a Small Business Administration Loan . If you do and you had eligible losses, what can fema do . Fema only provides reimbursement for uninsured losses. When there is not another way, whether a law or other program that can meet that need. Next up is vivian in california. Caller good morning. I would like to remind america that ever since President Trump took office, he promised he was going to do away with the Affordable Care act. He has worked on that for some time and we will he will continue to do away with it. Another thing i would like to mention is this is an impeached president and they still want to put him back in office. I dont understand that. If he can do away with it, people are in deep trouble. He promised he had a better plan , but that never materialized. Host you testified before congress in july on response to the pandemic. Fema hade felt like awarded contracts to some companies not capable of fulfilling them. Guest this is based upon our past history. Based on what we saw in the 2017 hurricane. Once fema has exhausted the there is a lot of things to make sure you have done. Once you have run out of those and youre looking for anyone, it turns out, the system can be that peopled in with intentions of delivering resources will bid all of these contracts. Some people find the markups they can get can be lucrative, so they will bid on the contract to see if they can find the products and services. Ultimately, you dont get anything. The only good news is that very rarely does anyone receive payment for that. Marie endorses after they receive product. It does mean that unfortunately, it slows out it slows down. That affects their ability to support their partners. Lets hear from jacob in florida. I was getting confused about everyone in the world and people seeking out gods faith. I dont understand that. Everyone says the cdc says to do this and the cdc says to do that. Togod almighty tells me offer my body a living sacrifice to him. When youre telling me to put a mask on my face, i serve the public in a supermarket. I am there all day wearing a mask. I cant breathe. All day. They must have cut me off. Host craig fugate. Vice President Biden has said he would issue a national mandate. Guest i would defer to the science, but increasingly, more and more researchers are saying not just is particulate. This is airborne. Much smaller particles of staying in the air much longer and that social distancing and handwashing just isnt going to cut it particularly enclosed or confined spaces where it is difficult to do that. Masks have been shown that where we do have that High Compliance that we do see a corresponding reduction in places. The more that we can get mask compliance is socially and people understand why we need to be wearing them and when it is appropriate to wear them and when it is not necessary, unfortunately, i think this is not something going away soon. Even with a vaccine that is approved, it will take time to connect people vaccinated that we could potentially get away from wearing masks. It is part of our new reality and how we protect ourselves and others. The more we have compliance with that, the more people that willingly wear the mask, the safer everybody is in the managed the better we can manage. We still continue to see more cases. That is slowing down our ability to slow down the build back the economy. The corps of engineers having a role. Will fema have a role in this region of vaccines . Guest no. I cant say for certain what they are looking at now, but we used what were called the whole of government of all of the federal agencies that would have some role in rolling out a vaccine. We wereat this when dealing with h1n1 in 2009. Femas primary role was generally going to be supporting the other lead federal agency with logistics and things like that. That remains to be seen, but i would caution people, warp speed in vaccine production doesnt mean the same thing to a lot of people. If you are listening to dr. Fauci and others that they may have a good candidate that can go through the process approval this fall, the distribution and production will still take time that we now have an effective vaccination program. Host back to calls. John in minnesota. I am living in minnesota, but i do have a house in florida. I cant afford the Homeowners Insurance any longer. A little bit worried about Climate Change and the rise in sea level. Host is that on your florida home . Caller right. Any response . Been a bigrance has issue in florida particularly after hurricane andrew and we had a lot of Major Insurance Companies merely go bankrupt or leave the market. Rates have gone up and this is a reflection of market prices and what it takes to ensure the risk of living in florida, particularly along the coast. A challenge i think we are going to see increasingly faced in other parts of the country. One of the hardest Economic Impacts after the storms is the availability and cost of insuring homes in these highrisk areas for these types of storms. As we are seeing more powerful storms and frequent storms, that is not just going to be an issue in florida, it is going to be an issue along the coastlines. I think this is probably one of the things that is people wanted Climate Change, the Insurance Markets are actually reflecting increasing cost what climate impacts look like. Onis pricing itself affordably. Host is it a big congress that decisions about local land decisions, where people build, close to the water, etc. Are made locally . They are made by the state and yet response in terms of insurance or Emergency Response is expected from the federal level . This is something that i dont think people quite understand. Pays for these losses during disasters. It begs the question of why we seeing all of this insurance particularly in government . What we have done is transfer a lot of the risk that local and state governments make on these decisions to the federal taxpayer. On the macro scale, we have set the price so low that many cases, we are not seeing much change in behavior. Enabling. Ses, we are we have to look at individual homeowners that have already built and live in these areas and how we manage. We have to really talk about future development and rebuilding in these areas. Stop building,e but we have to stop Start Building differently and building for the future. It seems we are running into these events that are always recordsetting weather events, but our infrastructure was built from the past and hasnt even been maintained. Host would you say the same is true for where People Choose to build in places like california and closeness to high burn areas . Guest there has been a lot of study done on white people, why we are seeing increased growth in these areas. A lot of it has to do with the price of housing and urban areas in california. People have moved out to find affordability. It is a challenge that when we were building for our past, as the future is now here, Climate Change isnt something that is going to be 30 or 40 years out. We are seeing impacts now. We didnt build for it. We are going through this very difficult, somewhat dangerous timeframe of how do we deal with what is already built in these areas, but more importantly, how do we rebuild and build new in these highrisk areas and this new reality that we have for climate impacts . From vanessa in mississippi. Good morning. Caller good morning. Concern is about this pandemic disease. What are we supposed to do when we have kids . Host what are you supposed to do with your kids, is that your question . Caller yeah. With education and stuff like that. [indiscernible] and worry about everything else. Host have your kids come back to school . Caller no. Host vanessa in mississippi. Anything to add . Guest it is a difficult decision. Are seeing particularly now in colleges that returning to campus has brought on new covid cases. There is a lot of people saying kids are not really affected by covid. We are saying that that is not exactly true. Situation that some parts of the country are in better position with much lower and others are looking at distance learning. I think longterm, we need to think about not just taking how we educate and applying learning to that, i really think about how we provide learning effectively, particularly in rural america. Think about how we can start bringing education to kids and parts of the country where they may not have access to that. On howan break the code they get broadband to all children, children with disabilities sometimes as a challenge. We want them in school. With covid, that may not be practical. It is not an easy answer. I think one of the tools we need to look at improving as broadband for all america and really looking at how we improve Digital Content and provide that in ways that not just during covid, but during other times, we can provide quality education to all children in this country. Host next up is tom in virginia. Caller thank you guys for having me on again. Cspan, you guys our national treasury. Im going to lay this all out for you. The cdc has come out saying it is virtually impossible for you to catch covid19 airborne. Youve got to have symptoms. Yet to be caught coughing, sneezing, you have to put droplets oliver surfaces. If you are asymptomatic, is virtually embossed for you to infect everybody. People like this guy have caused so much terror in america. Im in a hotel last week and i see a woman sitting by herself wearing latex gloves, a face shield and a mask. There was nobody within 150 feet of her and she is on her own own. She is protecting herself from her own phone. This guy is sitting here talking about the consequences of global warming. This pandemic is being used to terrify america. That is a fact. Go look at the cdc. This guy cannot provide you the sourcing for anybody by name or website of where it says that covid19 is spread airborne. If that was the case, listen very closely, since the beginning of this thing, i have literally only worn a mask in an i havent worn it more than an hour in the entire time. I train elderly people on firearm safety. Whole rooms full of elderly men and women who are terrified of all of this other social engineering that the liberals are responsible for. No one has covid19. York, other hand, in new the mayor deliberately infected almost 50,000 elderly people with covid19 resulting in their deaths. Young people will not die from covid19. Host tom, we will let you go. Your response . Guest 108,000 deaths, numbers going up. College Football Games canceled, College Teams having to quarantine players. The death rate is not going down. The best protection we have short of a vaccine is social distancing. Wearing a mask and taking the precautions to keep from spreading covid or getting covid. Ont question for you twitter. Hurricane proof rebuildings required when Insurance Companies pay out to rebuild . Awayare during their money and Building Back the way it was when it was destroyed. We need to do better. Guest we have seen that in florida and other states where they did improve. We have seen reductions in losses from these storms. In some cases, even our building codes are behind. Companies pay for what is called insurance cost. If there are newer costs, it will be upgraded to those, but there are a lot of places in the country that dont have military codes or current codes and the Insurance Company will only replace what the local building codes require. Host headline from a newspaper. Hurricane the third strike for this ravaged family. That white house issuing a statement saying the president is committed to deploying the full resources of the federal government and rescue those in distress and restore disruption to communities and infrastructure. In your experience either this has fundingyear, for fema ever been an issue. Guest back during hurricane irene, we ran out of money. People forget that we got pretty low. At that time, in the aftermath of that, speaker ryan and then jack lew came to an agreement on how to fund fema for future disasters. Outside of the worst catastrophic disasters, fema has been wellfunded. Congress has been willing to refund fema. We havent seen fema in that situation again. Again, fema is wellfunded for what we would consider the average of our hurricanes and earthquakes and fires and congress will step in when they need to for additional funding. Peoplehat we say to having issues with contractors. Who should they go to first with rev response . Generally, it is going to be local officials. Licensing boards or state typically have the responsibility to address those. Host lets get one more call from beverly. Hello and good morning america. To Ask Donald Trump if he would stop spreading the corona because he is not letting nobody wear masks. The diversity is so bad in america already, but now, there is violence because of a simple mask. It is just so bad. And use your all common sense and find a mask that does work for you. And even put some gloves on if you are in a big crowd. It will help you. Thank you. Host craig fugate, any final thoughts. Guest the 1918 pandemic, we saw similar backlash against masks. I think that is just something we have to deal with by education. Most, it is probably our effective tool right now between social distancing and wearing a mask. Wearing a mask cuts down on the spread. It is going to be key to keeping our economy recovered and it is going to be our best tool this year. A mask is not just a political statement. Your about keeping you and loved ones safe and Community Safe and getting our economy going again. Host our dayashington journal, every we are taking your calls live on the air, the news of the day, and to discuss policy issues that impact you. Coming up, the host of cnns reliable sources discusses his new book. Then, a biographer and president ial historian talks about campaign 2020 and the history of postconvention president ial campaigns. Washington journal live at 7 00 eastern this morning. Join the discussion with your phone calls, facebook comments, Text Messages, and tweet. Today, treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin testifies before the Coronavirus Crisis subcommittee on the state of the u. S. Economy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Watch live at 1 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan, at cspan. Org, or listen live with the free cspan radio app. The contenders, about the men who ran for the presidency and lost, but changed political history. Tonight, governor of illinois and later u. S. Ambassador to the United Nations adlai stevenson. The contenders, this week at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan. Monday, a threejudge panel from the u. S. Court of appeals for the d. C. Circuit ruled 21 to dismiss the house judiciary committees request for judicial enforcement of a subpoena issued to Donald Mcgahn to testify on the mueller investigation. Mr. Mcgann served as the president S White House counsel