Tropical Storm Helene formed in the Gulf of Mexico on Sept. 24, its projected path already showing it making landfall at the eastern end of the Florida panhandle. By the next day, it had gained enough energy to become a hurricane.
That same day, Sept. 25, the House of Representatives voted on a budget bill that would fund the government for a few more months, out past the presidential election. It was a continuing resolution, meaning that agencies would continue to receive the money they were already getting. If they needed more? Well, that would have to wait.
One day after that, Helene made landfall as a Category 4 storm. Over the next few days, it scraped through the southeast, unloading the moisture it picked up in the Gulf and drowning communities in North Carolina and elsewhere.
On Oct. 2, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whose department includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told reporters that — given the limits of the stopgap funding that had been approved — more would be needed to help the region fully recover.
“We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have. We are expecting another hurricane hitting,” Mayorkas said. “We do not have the funds. FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season and what — what is imminent.”
A few minutes later, he clarified his point.
“As I mentioned, we have the immediate needs right now,” Mayorkas explained. “On a continuing resolution, we have funds, but that is not a stable source of supply, if you will. This is a multibillion-dollar, multiyear recovery.” What’s more, he said later, “we can obtain spend-fast funds so that we can dip into funds that are slated for the duration of the year to meet immediate needs.”
“So, we are meeting the moment,” he said, “but that doesn’t speak about the future.”
His comments quickly got picked up by the right-wing media ecosystem, including Fox News. But not all of his comments; the channel’s on-air personalities mostly focused on the part about how FEMA didn’t have the funding Mayorkas sought. Or, as host Trace Gallagher put it on “Fox News @ Night” on Oct. 3, “FEMA is apparently broke, at least the part of the federal agency that hands out money to hurricane victims.”
Gallagher quickly made a connection that emerged repeatedly in Fox’s coverage over the next few days. Declaring that “the federal government has screwed up again,” Gallagher chastised Mayorkas for saying “there is not enough money in FEMA to fund the remainder of the hurricane season, yet FEMA is still actively funding SSP, the Shelter and Services Program, which provides funding to illegal immigrants, money for everything, from housing, to clothing, to translation services.”
As The Washington Post Fact Checker noted Oct. 4, it was not true that funding was shifted from emergency management to aid immigrants — though that had happened during the presidency of Donald Trump.
The Fact Checker was responding to a claim from Trump that “they” — the Biden administration — “stole the FEMA money just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them.”
It is also not true, of course, that noncitizen immigrants can cast ballots. But immigration is the central focus of Trump’s campaign, and so nearly everything else gets presented through that lens. The election is at risk of being stolen, he and his allies claim … because of immigrant voting. FEMA is out of money to help Real Americans, they argue … because of immigrants. And so on.
Fox News aired the Trump comments quoted above on the Oct. 3 episode of its show “The Five.” Co-host Jesse Watters then reinforced Trump’s claim.
“Right now, storm-ravaged residents are struggling to survive and begging for basics like food and water,” he claimed. “And FEMA is running low on funds because they’re blowing it all on illegals.”
Later that evening, host Sean Hannity made a similar allegation, claiming that “they took over $1 billion of FEMA funds supposed to be available for national emergencies — to help you the American people if God forbid there’s an emergency as bad as this one — and they spent all of that money on their 11.5 million unvetted illegal immigrants from over 180 countries.”
The next evening, Hannity aired a clip in which Fox News reporter Sara Carter interviewed storm victims.
“Right now, the New York Post and some others have reported that basically FEMA has allocated $1.4 billion,” she said, “but that money was allocated for illegal migrant crisis, not for hurricanes, not for natural disasters, for the illegal migration crisis. When you hear that as a taxpayer, what goes through your mind?”
“Anger,” the woman replied, understandably.
Gallagher stoked the same sentiment during the Oct. 4 episode of “Fox News @ Night,” encouraging viewers who might have been “surprised to see that FEMA is funding illegal immigrants” to weigh in on social media, promising them that some responses would appear on air.
At times, Fox News’s coverage has included corrections from the federal government. Watters mentioned one Monday.
“Where did the money go? More than a billion dollars went to welcoming Biden’s migrants,” he said. “Now, the White House says that’s not true, but we have the tape.”
On Tuesday evening, Fox News reporter Chad Pergram broke news on his own social media account.
Fox has obtained a fact sheet assembled by the majority side of House Appropriations Committee about disaster aid.
It says that FEMA “has enough funding in the short-term to address immediate needs for both Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.”
It also declares there is “no…
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) October 9, 2024
The channel had obtained a fact sheet produced by the Republican Majority on the House committee responsible for federal funding, Pergram said. The document reinforced that FEMA had necessary funding for the short-term storm response and that funding streams for storm response and immigration were separate. “[T]he only connection,” it states according to Pergram, “is that both programs are administered by FEMA.”
As of writing, Pergram’s report has been included in one story on FoxNews.com. The article, headlined “Resurfaced video shows FEMA worrying about faith-based partners’ treatment of trans migrants at border,” dedicates its final paragraph to summarizing Pergram’s social media post.
There are other articles at the site that offer information challenging the claim that FEMA is “broke” and/or that the agency has shifted disaster relief funds to aid immigrants. There have been interviews that aired on Fox News in which those claims were similarly challenged.
But this gets to the tension that has undergirded the channel in the past decade: Is its mandate to retain viewers or to report the news? The former means amplifying and backstopping claims made by Donald Trump in order not to alienate them. (They saw the dangers that posed in the aftermath of the 2020 election.) Since Trump is so consistently dishonest, though, that means amplifying and defending false claims, which is the opposite of reporting the news.
The channel often navigates this divide by differentiating between its opinion and news coverage — a line that’s blurry in general and which is often blurred in the channel’s programming. When Watters says “we have the tape” in response to a White House denial or shows a Gallagher segment called “Common Sense Department” in which he alleges that immigration is sapping disaster response money, what are viewers supposed to assume?
We know what viewers are supposed to assume.