Republicans in Texas will use federal funds to pay exorbitant utility bills that hit ordinary Texans after a freezer paralyzed the state this week, a senior congressman said on Sunday.
Millions of Texans were subject to power outages as cold weather overwhelmed an unprepared state grid, independent of federal oversight by design. The outage has contributed to dozens of deaths and a crisis over safe access to water that persisted even as temperatures rose.
On Saturday, President Joe Biden declared a major disaster and released money to help. On Sunday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told ABC’s This Week that the president was “eager to go to Texas and show his support.” But she also said that Biden was “very aware that it is not a light footprint for a president to travel to a disaster area” and “does not want to take away resources or attention.”
Reports have been circulating that some Texans whose power has held on are now facing huge bills as private companies try to capitalize. The New York Times reported a case in which a 63-year-old Social Security military veteran living in the suburbs of Dallas was faced with an electricity bill of nearly $ 17,000, 70 times what he would normally pay for all utilities combined.
“I can’t help it,” Scott Willoughby told the paper, “but it broke me.”
Texas Republican Michael McCaul, former chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, spoke to CNN’s State of the Union.
“The current plans with the federal welfare law are to help the homeowners fix both because we have a lot of water leaks, a lot of water damage pipes burst, but also [pay] their electricity bill too, ”he said.
Host Dana Bash challenged him, saying, “I hear you say that the federal government will help bail out and pay bills in a state that is partially in this mess because it wants to be separate from the federal government. government. That’s pretty rich, don’t you think? “
McCaul dodged the question, saying Texas should instead prepare for more extreme climate events. The freezer, he said, was “just a taste of what to expect if the United States doesn’t tackle the climate crisis head-on.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or Fema, disaster statement applied to 77 of Texas’s 254 counties, prompting Governor Greg Abbott to say it should cover the entire state.
Psaki said, “What is happening here is that the governor has filed for a federal disaster statement. The president asked his team to speed that up. And Fema determined where … it should deploy its immediate resources, where the countries that were hit hardest, so that they can make sure they get to the people who need it most.
“That means not only getting people through this emergency, but also getting people through recovery, people who have no water, no heating, need a place to stay awhile, that’s what will help that big disaster statement. or that is our hope. “
McCaul was asked about comments in which former Texas governor and US energy secretary Rick Perry claimed, “Texans would be without electricity for more than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.”
McCaul said, “Power sharing would have been useful if we could have shared with other power grids.” That couldn’t happen, he said, because the Texas power grid was “set up… to be independent of federal oversight and regulation. That’s very good with things like cyber security, not so good when it comes to an Arctic blast like this.
“In 2011, after we had a really bad freeze, the state legislature released a two-part report with recommendations to the energy companies on how to winterize our operations.”
Those recommendations were not followed up.
“So when it happened, our entire energy system wasn’t winterized for freezing temperatures,” McCaul said. “That’s what we’re going to look at, these recommendations made in 2011.”
McCaul was also asked about the efforts of prominent Democrats, including Beto O’Rourke and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the former from El Paso but the last from New York, to help ordinary Texans. Such actions contrasted sharply with the behavior of Republicans, including Senator Ted Cruz, who flew to Mexico with his family instead of staying in his Houston home, a move for which he has been pilloried.
“I think we should help too,” McCaul said, “and we will do that with the federal emergency statement we got from the president. But I love that they are crossing party lines to help Americans first and not just Republicans or Democrats.
“… I know some of them absorb heat. Like, when a crisis hits my condition, I’m there. I’m not going on holiday. I know Mr. Cruz calls it a mistake and he admitted it. But I think that was a big mistake. “