A month after Sandy hit New York and New Jersey in November 2012, the Obama administration requested $60 billion in appropriations for disaster relief.
That request eventually passed in the form of the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act. Before it did, however, the Congressional Budget Office found that more than 60 percent of the funds included in the draft bill would not be spent until at least 2015.
Leave it to the text of the House version of the bill, H.R. 152, to describe the funding package best: “Supplemental appropriations to improve and streamline disaster assistance for Hurricane Sandy, and for other purposes.”
Other purposes indeed. The bill had provisions involving fisheries in Alaska and New England; upgraded Amtrak lines, which had been largely unaffected by the storm; set aside money for highway improvements throughout the entire country; and devoted funds to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to help it improve its weather forecasting.
It also set aside $16 billion for a community-development fund that would send money to any state that had declared a disaster within the previous two years — a criterion met by all but Arizona, Michigan, and South Carolina.
Provisions such as these more usually go through the normal budgetary process; here, they were jammed into a bill that simply had to pass.
In terms of pork-barrel spending, this is the essence of treif.
Sure enough, some Republicans opposed the pork-laden bill. Among those were Texas senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, along with several House Republicans from Texas because they subscribed to the proposition that disaster-relief bills should be targeted to relieve disaster.
Much of the bundle of bacon that politicians squeezed into the Sandy relief bill had nothing to do with hurricanes, much less Hurricane Sandy. If anyone was cynically exploiting a disaster, it was not those who opposed the bill but those who designed it.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450912/hurricane-harvey-gop-non-hypocrisy