What Project 2025's Disaster Response Could Cost MAGA Voters
A real-life example from one North Carolina community (Scroll to the end to listen)
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Since Hurricane Helene tore through the southeastern United States, I’ve read numerous stories about what Project 2025 will do to federal disaster response. Today, I aim to do better than parroting what Project 2025 says. Using a real-world example, I hope to explain what it could mean for YOU or yours. Which could include MAGA voters in your lives.
But first, a refresher for new subscribers.
I wrote about Republican plans to gut federal disaster relief, weather science, and flood insurance way back in February, when nobody was thinking about hurricane season. I was among the first to report these aspects of Project 2025.
I include links to those newsletters below.
For those lacking time to read three newsletters, Project 2025 will:
Shutter the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including the National Hurricane Center, and privatize all weather reporting (with a “Climate Change Isn’t Real” message).
Reserve FEMA for “major” disasters, as defined by the federal government. Impacted states and localities would be responsible for cleanup and rebuilding communities hit by disasters not deemed “major.” This includes paying 100% of the cost at the state and local level.
Privatize the Federal Flood Insurance program, which would drastically reduce coverage AND increase prices, rendering many properties uninsurable.
What does this actually mean in real life?
In 2008, my husband and I bought a piece of land near Burnsville, North Carolina (but this area could be mirrored in parts of Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.) We spent a lot of time on that crag of rock at a bend in the North Toe River, enough to want to own a sliver. Circa the mid-aughts economic crisis, hiking crude trails and traversing one-lane bridges and getting lost in hollers was an escape from our stressful lives.
Burnsville is in Yancey County. A link to demographics is HERE, showing it to be a poorer, predominately white area. County residents voted 66% for Donald Trump in 2020. It isn’t packed with gated communities and wealthy vacation homeowners. Until a decade or so ago, it was dry (meaning we had to stock up on alcohol in Asheville if we wanted an adult beverage in our rented cabin.)
We never put a house on that land, but we’ve spent a lot of time in Western North Carolina. We couldn’t drive to our property today because:
There was a landslide on the major federal highway into Burnsville, and the road is closed indefinitely. Significant washouts occurred all the way to Spruce Pine.
Numerous state and county roads are impassable (like NC State Road 197, used in the example below.)
Multiple bridges are gone — not partially damaged — gone. Thousands of people are stranded. Their homes may be fine, but with washed-out roads and vanished bridges, their properties may not be habitable for long.
The Clinchfield Railroad rings the North Toe and ferries coal to energy companies in North and South Carolina. Multiple railway bridges were obliterated, and the railway is closed indefinitely, exacerbating power shortages in both states.
Let’s talk about how state and municipal governments fund infrastructure projects like roads and bridges.
I spoke to a person with experience obtaining federal funds for infrastructure projects at the municipal level. According to him, the only way MOST roads or bridges get built is with significant federal funds, in addition to state and county investments.
In normal, non-disaster times, it is easier to convince state and county taxpayers to fund 25% of the cost of a major road replacement or expansion if their elected officials tell them 75% of the cost will be footed by the federal government, which is typical in many American communities. Infrastructure building is expensive. Almost half of it happens because of federal investment.
An influx of federal funds is The ONLY way these repairs are realized after a disaster.
Project 2025 calls for state and local governments to foot those bills without federal assistance. Thus, their citizens will pay for them with increased taxes. The impact can be significant.
Let’s show what that means with an example.
Imagine it’s a year from today, and Republicans won the November election. There is no NOAA and no FEMA for all but “major” disasters. The federal flood insurance program has been privatized, and millions of customers have been dropped without warning. States and counties have been told to buckle up and pray this hurricane season, because they’re on their own to fix any damage not deemed “major.”
Another hurricane rips through the Appalachian mountains stronger than projected and causes the carnage I bullet-pointed above.
Yancey County, NC (where Burnsville is located) had 18,500 residents at last count. Some people (like us) own property but don’t live there, so let’s round that number up to an even 25,000 properties to get our tax base.
If the storm does the kind of damage Helene has, there will be a need to clear landslide debris, shore up mountainsides, rebuild roadbed, and replace bridges along a short section of State Road 197 that parallels the North Toe River from Green Mountain to Toecane, North Carolina (approximately 8 miles of road at $5 million per surface mile = $40 million.) Replacing two bridges would cost an additional $4 million. A minor road that serves an essential link for a small population could be a $44 million necessity.
Before the election, FEMA would have supplied funding and resources for much of this work, but if the Project 2025 federal government doesn’t deem this damage “major” and chooses not to fund cleanup and repair, the state of North Carolina and Yancey County must organize and pay for it themselves.
On average, the state/local split for road infrastructure projects is 60/40, so in this case Yancey County taxpayers will be on the hook for $17.6 million. With a tax base of 25,000 properties:
$17.6 million / 25,000 properties = $705 average tax levy per property just to repair ONE road after ONE disaster in ONE community in ONE county.
Many counties, especially in the southeast, provide tax breaks for higher dollar properties, meaning lower dollar properties pay higher taxes per square foot/acre than higher dollar properties, which would be exacerbated by a weather event like Helene. It could create hundreds of such needs across the county and state, which could cascade the tax levy by a factor of ten or more on each individual property owner.
Can you imagine swallowing such a tax increase? Or being faced with another such increase after every subsequent disaster?
Scores of communities that vote for Republicans would face tax increases and reduced disaster services if Republicans win in November, all mandated by Project 2025.
Some might argue they deserve this projected fate for voting against themselves and their interests. I say we share this information with them — right now, while it’s top of mind — to make a difference in November.
This is the FINAL DAY of my FREE FOR ALL SPECIAL. As of this writing, around 160 of my 10,700 subscribers have upgraded to PAID. We only need a few more of you to step up, and this Substack can be FREE FOR ALL in the lead-up to the election (1 October - 5 November 2024.) $6.40 one time, Americans.
Hit that button below!
We mapped the impact of Hurricane Helene with data from the National Weather Service. The flooded congressional districts were overlaid with the Republicans who voted against President Biden's Infrastructure bill that strengthened dams, bridges and roads. And the Senators who recently did not vote to fund FEMA (including JD Vance, Rick Scott and Josh Hawley). That makes i easier to know who to hold them accountable.
Home flooded by a dam break? Remember Who Voted Against Investing In Infrastructure.
https://thedemlabs.org/2024/09/29/republicans-voted-against-strengthening-dams-now-at-risk-from-flooding/
See what Project 2025 Plan To Cut FEMA and the National Weather Service (NOAA) means For You on this interactive map. Project 2025 may seem like a nebulous thing, but the pain it promises to inflict is very real.
https://thedemlabs.org/2024/09/29/project-2025-to-cut-fema-and-noaa/
Andra, this is a great application of Project 2025 to a real disaster that has occurred. However, I understood it to be that FEMA would help with natural disasters, but not terrorism or things from Department of Human Services. Says, they want to change the cost share amount for small disasters, like 25-75 percent government-local area. And create a threshold under which states and localities are not eligible for assistance. So that means poorer places get less. They are encouraged to raise their own monies. They are complaining about flood insurance as being a taxpayer bailout. So, even with 25% help from the Feds, that would not be enough. Then there are the other factors that would compound the misery. Since they plan on removing a lot of immigrants, undocumented and documented, there will not be enough labor to help to fix the roads and bridges, and schools and hospitals if there is even the money. Let alone with the tariffs they are planning with various countries we cannot be sure that we will have access to all of the supplies we need in the supply chain. I have said that Project 2025 is a recipe for turning the USA into a third world country, perhaps permanently. One thing about Trump's massive plan to get rid of immigrants right away, is that whatever kind of humanitarian catastrophe and human rights violations will go along with that, there will also be billions lost from our economic base, and lots of people will lose jobs because of that, and then there will be an even lower tax base to draw from. What is done quickly by a next Trump or Project 2025 following administration can take decades to undo. In fact, what Reagan did was make so many changes to government, while lying to everyone that they were good, that generations have grown up not even knowing that the government can help you and prevent your hitting the level of misery that life in the USA is for some and will be for a lot more. A Christian Nationalist Theocracy, of Dickensian level misery.