After days of apocalyptic videos of the storm-ravaged South, some feel-good stories are finally starting to trickle out from the wreckage. A lost wedding ring, recovered in the backyard after 10 years of searching. “Miracle babies” born to new moms struggling to get to the hospital. A dad, trekking 27 miles by foot through debris so he could walk his daughter down the aisle. But as resilient and inspiring as these affected communities are, they can’t escape another disaster: the White House’s mismanagement of FEMA.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been a political flashpoint since two hurricanes and dozens of tornados hammered states like the Carolinas, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, and Virginia, killing hundreds of people. House-impeached Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, who oversees FEMA, triggered widespread outrage late last week when he claimed his department “does not have the funds” to see the country through this hurricane season.

“We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have,” Mayorkas told the press on Air Force One. “We do not have the funds. FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season and what — what is imminent.”

That’s interesting, several governors and elected officials fired back, since FEMA hasn’t had any trouble finding the money to help illegal immigrants. In the last two years, the New York Post points out, “more than $1.4 billion has been committed from FEMA-administered programs to support non-federal entities that are taking care of migrants. Just this year, critics fume, Mayorkas’s DHS has funneled “$640.9 million … in FEMA-administered funds to aid state and local governments coping with the influx of asylum seekers.”

“Put Americans first,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) demanded of the White House on X. “Yeah!” the owner of X, Elon Musk, chimed in. And yet, the Left and legacy media are trying to paint House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) as a heartless leader for refusing to call Congress back to D.C. to allocate more money to disaster relief.

“… [I was in] Asheville, North Carolina earlier this week,” the speaker told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Saturday’s “This Week on the Hill.” “Walking through the devastation, it looks like a nuclear bomb went off. These communities are going to take a long time to recover, and FEMA has not done what it needed to do. The people there tell you themselves they’re still in need of supplies and rescue in some places [more than two weeks] post-storm. And now we had Milton hit Florida. So there’s a lot to do.”

But, he insisted, “It’s not Congress’s fault. Let me point out very clearly with regard to the funding [that] before we left Washington on September 25th, Congress appropriated $20 billion additional dollars to FEMA to cover its immediate needs because we knew the storms were coming. They, at my last count, told me they’d spent … 1% of that funding. So there is not a need for Congress to come back yet. But we will certainly cover the losses when the states tabulate what those losses are.”

Besides, Johnson warned, FEMA hasn’t exactly been spending its money wisely. In a heated exchange with NBC News’s Kristen Welker, he insisted, “[The] FEMA dollars going to resettle migrants, that is a fact. That is an objective fact,” Johnson said. Welker interjected, denying that any funds were redirected to help illegal immigrants. “That has been debunked,” she argued. “FEMA has said as much.”

“No, no ma’am,” the speaker chimed in. “Wait a minute, hold on. ... Facts are important,” Johnson said. “That is a new program that started in 2020 under Joe Biden. That funding wasn’t necessary under Trump’s administration, because we secured the border. We didn’t invite illegal aliens and dangerous people into the country. That’s a Biden-Harris policy and everybody knows it.”

To Perkins, Johnson called Mayorkas’s dodge, “an effort to distract,” “an effort to blame shift.” The reality is, he pointed out, “There’s been a real lack of leadership in the response to these disasters. I’ve been on the road, and I’ve been to these areas. I had boots on the ground in Georgia a few days after the storm hit, and then I went to Florida, and I spent time there going through the disaster areas, walking through. ... It was devastating. … And it took FEMA too long to respond. You know, the thing about hurricanes, you and I [are] from Louisiana, we’ve been through this. We’ve lived through it. We know a hurricane is largely predictable — at least a week in advance when it’s on the way. … It’s not like a tornado or an earthquake or something that just happens without notice. And FEMA did not have pre-positioned assets in a lot of these places, and they didn’t do what is necessary and was needed.”

And part of the reason for this entire debacle is the mismanagement of taxpayer funds, which he believes should have never gone to migrants at the expense of hurting Americans. “It’s outrageous,” Johnson shook his head. “It is absolutely outrageous. The American people are so frustrated by that, and so are Republican members of Congress. … [T]hey used FEMA funding, not the disaster relief fund, but other funds that went to FEMA in excess of $1 billion to move these people around the country. So when you’ve seen planes, trains, and automobiles moving illegals, non-citizens to resettle all around America, that was taxpayers reimbursing all that. … And I think there’s going to be a price paid for that in November.”

Asked what it would take for FEMA to get on the ball, the speaker replied bluntly. “It’s going to take an election,” he said. “We need new leadership. Obviously, the buck stops at the top. Mayorkas is the secretary of Homeland Security. FEMA is a division of DHS. And remember that we impeached Alejandro Mayorkas. He’s the first sitting cabinet secretary in the history of the United States to have gone through that in the House. We took no pleasure in it, but we had no choice because it was such a lack of leadership in every measure. And this is just one more symptom of that. So you have to elect people. You have to elect a commander-in-chief to be in the White House and leaders in Congress who will affirm and confirm cabinet secretaries who are worthy of their positions and who can do the job.”