ask for a disaster supplemental shortly. we are also secondly heading up into the end of a fiscal year, and so any available money from a regularly appropriated perspective at a department or agency is running out. the end of the fiscal year is upon us. and so congress had already planned to provide us some replenishment into that fund through the regular course of operations. and then thirdly, if there are, and there will be, needs for additional funding in the future, as those drawdown construction numbers become more clear on the recovery phase, we ll be able to look at them and ask for a third, you know, kind of bite at the apple on this. that s where we stand and i m not worried at all that we don t have the money right now for the operations under way and the operations that we foresee in the next month. thank you. you mentioned the office of assistance from the leaders of canada and mexico. will the president be accepting any of those offers of assistance? the answer here is
for congress, appropriations request. i will make that request shortly. we ll make that request based on the information that we have now, and what we ll do then is come back later for a second supplemental question when we have additional information that would make a more informed total for congress to consider. i would like to stop on that point and take a few questions. obviously, after hurricane sandy, some money flowed fairly quickly but the big bill didn t get signed until months after. how important is it, do you believe, with texas for congress to get that money through faster? the president promised it would happen quickly. so, three things here. first you have to look at the health of the disaster relief fund, which is funding most of this operation. that was a relatively healthy fund. it had about $3.6 billion in it heading into this storm. that allowed us to get through the initial response operations. that drawdown rate, though, is something we keep a close eye on. we
does governor abbott s estimate sound reasonable that this will exceed $100 billion, and the second question is, we ve received a lot of sanguine reports about coordinations between federal, state, and local agencies. can you give me a sense of one or two challenge areas where that coordination may require some improvement. okay, so on the first question, there s nobody that s wrong on estimates right now. i don t have any information to challenge anyone s estimate, and i don t think that they have any reason to think their estimates are wrong so we re in the estimate game right now and as a result, what we d like to do is not get into second guessing anybody, in particular the governor, who s got the firsthand knowledge of what s happening. but what we d like to do as a strategy is figure out the predictable burn rate for the response operations and puts up a responsible supplemental request to congress. we ll give them a sound supplemental request number. we ll add to it i think
at this point, this disaster proves that even if you re not in a floodplain, you still run the risk of having your house flood. couple of questions here and i ll give you a couple of answers. first, just for clarity, because there are people suffering looking for immediate answers. for clarity s sake, if you have flood insurance policy and you ve been paying your premiums, call and get your claim in. there is no problem, there is no shortfall. we have enough money to meet those claims and you re going to get what you ve got coming to you under your policy. so that s the first, i think, answer here for the national flood insurance program. the second one for people watching this, you have to understand that that flood insurance program is coming up to be reauthorized. it s about to expire. it s going to have to ri authorized and i have every confidence that congress will reauthorize that program. and the third part of your question is, how much money is left under that borrowing autho
funding, followed by supplemental requests, not worried about running out of money. how, how smoothly do you think that ll go with congress? i mean, many times this does not go that smoothly with congress because obviously we have a lot of fiscal hawks out there who will be looking very closely at the supplemental looking for, you know, any extras that are tagged on, remember during superstorm sandy there was a huge debate over that bill which some people criticize as being a christmas tree of spending. governor chris christie debunked that saying there was misunderstanding about what was in the bill. i do think this will be a political football in congress especially as you get further out from the storm often the need doesn t seem as immediate. certainly right now the says they are committed to getting the aid that s needed. you heard an estimate being