HOUSTON — The Trump administration said Sunday that it wants Congress to attach aid for victims of Hurricane Harvey to a bill that would increase the federal debt limit, a move that clashes with an influential group of House conservatives who have warned GOP leaders not to connect the two funding initiatives.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin revealed the administration’s approach Sunday morning when he was asked whether the White House could guarantee that funding for the disaster would not be attached to the fight in Washington over the debt ceiling.
“No, I can’t. Quite the contrary,” Mnuchin said on “Fox News Sunday,” adding: “The president and I believe that it should be tied to the Harvey funding.”
Mnuchin argued that if the debt ceiling is not raised, funding to help Texas recover from the hurricane could be delayed.
“Our first priority is to make sure that the state gets money, it is critical, and to do that we need to make sure we raise the debt limit,” he said. “Without raising the debt limit, I’m not comfortable that we will get the money that we need this month to Texas to rebuild.”
If the debt ceiling isn’t raised soon, the U.S. government will have enough funds to continue operations only through Sept. 29, Mnuchin has told lawmakers. Appropriating emergency money to help with the Harvey response will accelerate that deadline by several days, he has said.
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Harvey aid is “likely” to be combined with a larger bill, a decision that will be made shortly.
“Whether you put that [Harvey aid] together with keeping the doors open for the government or the debt-ceiling vote, I think that’s something that will be decided in the next few days, I expect,” he said.
Blunt cautioned against expecting Congress to commit a single pot of money toward Harvey relief soon after aid for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, stabilization, cleanup and small-business loans is allocated. He said that rather than handing over a large lump sum, as was done for Hurricane Sandy in 2012, relief money should be given out multiple times on an as-needed basis.
Recovery continued here Sunday, with an eye toward opening for business as much as possible on Tuesday.
“I’m encouraging people to get up and let’s get going,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said on “Meet the Press.”
“There is still tremendous need. Don’t want to downplay that … but most of the city is dry, and I’m saying to people — if you can open, let’s open up and let’s get started.”
Turner said the focus this week will be on “housing, housing, housing,” especially for low-income and senior residents. He praised President Trump for a “very positive” visit Saturday.
“Come and visit us in one year and I’ll show you a better city than it was before the storm,” Turner said.
Many here tried to return to old routines and habits, flocking to newly reopened gyms, playgrounds and restaurants. Baseball came back Saturday, with the Houston Astros playing their first home games since Hurricane Harvey struck. They beat the New York Mets twice on Saturday to sweep a doubleheader.
But it was clear to most in this struggling and still-soggy region that things would not be anywhere close to normal anytime soon. Some returned to their houses for the first time, pulling out rotting furniture and waterlogged clothes and piling them in ever-expanding mounds by the curbs. Anyone with water in their homes is still under a mandatory evacuation order, which Turner said would probably remain in place for 10 days. Schools are scheduled to open Sept. 11, but some are still waterlogged.
[Texans’ do-it-ourselves rescue effort defines Hurricane Harvey]
The situation remains dire in Southeast Texas, where state officials warned that floodwaters are expected to linger for days. East of Houston, small towns remained inundated, and the nearly 120,000 residents of Beaumont remained without drinking water or even water for flushing toilets.
Firefighters in Crosby, 25 miles northeast of Houston, kept a worried watch over an unstable chemical plant that in recent days has been the scene of explosions and fires that sent a towering pillar of acrid black smoke high into the sky. Federal and local officials expressed concern that the storm’s aftermath could bring other industrial accidents, environmental contamination and the potential for sickness and disease.
As the flooding in some parts receded, authorities turned to the grim task of recovering bodies. Forty-five deaths have been confirmed, but that number is expected to rise in coming days.
At least 200,000 homes have been damaged, the Texas Department of Public Safety reported Sunday, with more than 12,750 destroyed. But those numbers also are certain to increase because the estimate excluded areas that officials have not been able to reach. More than 457,000 people have registered for disaster assistance, according to FEMA.
Houston school officials, surveying some buildings for the first time since the hurricane hit last weekend, were stunned by what they encountered.
The storm damaged nearly half of all public schools here, part of the nation’s seventh-largest education system, and more than 75 campuses will require major cleanups or repairs that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars, officials said. As of Saturday, the damage to 40 district schools had not even been assessed because they still had several feet of water in their classrooms, cafeterias and auditoriums.
“It’s not just an assessment of whether they are dry or they’re wet,” said Schools Superintendent Richard Carranza. Workers are trying to check for structural damage, air quality, mold, the integrity of pipes and whether computers and other equipment still work.
That process will take months, but Carranza said he wants to get teachers into as many schools as possible by Friday, with the system’s 218,000 students to follow on Sept. 11. The school year had been scheduled to officially start last Monday, when Harvey was pummeling the city with what ultimately was measured as 50 inches of rain.
Officials are considering several scenarios, including consolidating multiple schools onto one campus, mapping creative busing routes and possibly dividing the school day and assigning different groups of students to morning and afternoon sessions.
Trump and the first lady visited Houston on Saturday, stopping at one of its biggest emergency shelters to talk with storm victims. In public comments, he highlighted the toll on families while also recognizing the relief efforts and praising the way his administration was handling the disaster.
[Trump returns to flood-ravaged Texas, this time to try out role of ‘consoler-in-chief’]
“We saw a lot of happiness,” Trump said after meeting evacuees in the NRG Center. “It’s been really nice. It’s been a wonderful thing. As tough as this was, it’s been a wonderful thing, I think even for the country to watch it, for the world to watch.”
Throughout the state’s Gulf Coast, residents and officials spent Saturday in an awkward kind of limbo, drumming up optimism for the difficult recovery ahead even as they acknowledged other potential dangers.
Many of the Houston area’s Superfund sites — locations designated by the federal Environmental Protection Agency as the country’s most intensely polluted places — were flooded. Of those, 11 remain so overrun that authorities have not been able to assess the damage and potential toxic hazards, EPA officials said Saturday.
The Associated Press reported that water from an overflowing river had poured so hard through one site — where the soil contains dioxins and other contaminants linked to birth defects and cancer — that it badly damaged a nearby interstate highway bridge.
Fetid waters greeted many people as they returned to their homes. According to authorities in Humble, north of Houston, one resident found that a new occupant had moved in: a large alligator, lurking under the dining room table.
In East Houston, where floodwaters remained as high as four feet in many areas, school officials allowed reporters to tour one building.
Even before the storm, A.G. Hilliard Elementary was facing challenges. The school is in one of the most impoverished communities in the city.
It now confronts a gargantuan challenge, with water pooled around chairs and computers and black-and-white composition books soaked through and strewn all over classroom floors. The entire school smelled rancid and damp on Saturday. A thin layer of dirt covered the floors like brown powdered sugar. Even the blue painted paw prints of the school’s mascot at the front entrance were smeared.
The devastation inflicted by Harvey will require workers to tear up the entire vinyl flooring, cut away up to four feet off the walls and apply an antimicrobial treatment to everything, officials explained. Lockers will have to be pulled out, as well as the gym’s padded floors.
Rhonda Skillern-Jones, a board of education trustee, broke down in tears as she walked the hallways.
In 2013, the Houston district absorbed the schools in the community into its system after the state shut them down for poor academic performance, financial troubles and mismanagement.
“The kids were pretty far behind on the learning curve. We made a lot of progress with them over time, catching them up and getting them on grade level,” said Skillern-Jones, a mother of five. “I’m just afraid that this is such a setback for them educationally.”
For many of the children here, she explained, Hilliard is one of the few pillars of stability in their lives. “It’s going to take a lot of people pulling together to support these babies.”
Hernández reported from Houston. Wan, Zezima and Shaban reported from Washington. Todd Frankel in Lake Charles, La.; Emily Wax-Thibodeaux, Philip Rucker and Abigail Hauslohner in Houston; and Amy B Wang, Karoun Demirjian and Susan Svrluga in Washington contributed to this report.
Earl Williams, 70, sits on the front porch of his flooded home in Nome, Tex., about 80 miles east of Houston. Williams’s father built the home in 1976, and he hopes he can repair the home rather than tear it down. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center has become a shelter for those displaced by Harvey. (John Taggart for The Washington Post)