Ryan: More hurricane aid likely coming in October

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Wednesday that he expects Congress will approve more emergency aid in October to help communities affected by recent hurricanes.

Ryan made the remarks during a day-long tour with a bipartisan congressional delegation surveying areas in Florida hit by Hurricane Irma. He said lawmakers are still waiting for official estimates of how much money will be needed before crafting another funding package.

“As we assess and we get more information from the administration, I’m sure that we’re going to do another what we call a ‘supplemental’ sometime in October once we have a full assessment of what is needed,” Ryan said during a news conference in Miami.

{mosads}

The funding would be in addition to the $15 billion in disaster recovery aid Congress passed earlier this month for victims of Hurricane Harvey, which primarily battered the Texas coast.

Ryan visited Jacksonville, Miami and the Florida Keys on Wednesday, meeting with lawmakers representing districts in those regions and surveying recovery efforts from a U.S. Coast Guard plane.

Ryan was accompanied by House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. John Carter (R-Texas), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Department of Homeland Security. Officials from the Coast Guard and Florida’s Division of Emergency Management joined the Speaker as well.

Frelinghuysen and Carter will be central in authoring legislation to provide extra funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to deal with the hurricane aftermath.

As Florida residents recovered from the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, yet another hurricane, dubbed Maria, knocked out power in all of Puerto Rico on Wednesday. 

Puerto Rico had already been affected by Irma, which hit the island before reaching Florida earlier this month.