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The political war over Hurricane Helene is heating up. Elon Musk is accusing FEMA of blocking his attempts to deliver Starlinks to areas affected by the disaster. Right-wing Twitter/X is full of talk about various incidents in which purportedly people coming to the area to try to help and/or deliver supplies are being turned away by FEMA. Also full of talk about FEMA using money to support illegal immigrants. Some people are pushing theories that FEMA is deliberately withholding help.
How credible is any of this?
My guess is that FEMA is a typical semi-competent government agency that makes many blunders. It might be bad at coordinating with random people who want to help but are not government employees and it might thus institutionally prefer to just block off the area and try to handle everything without random people's assistance. This policy then causes the various incidents that are being talked about.
I doubt that FEMA is deliberately withholding aid, if for no other reason than that I do not see how withholding aid would benefit the Democrats politically.
What do you make of it?
Totally incredible? Like, what is the actual evidence people are giving? Here's an article quoting multiple NC state, FEMA, and federal government officials about the effort. Here is a post by an actual Asheville resident describing the scale of the federal response. The contrast is with, what, anonymous sources "on the ground"?
It would be very Seeing Like a State for government agencies to dump a shitload of assets and supplies in the major regional cities with no real plan to get aid to the isolated residents in the mountains whose roads have been washed out.
FEMA in Asheville doesn't nessesarily mean FEMA in wherever the hell this is.
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