Texas Republicans will use federal funds to help pay the exorbitant energy bills that hit ordinary Texans after a deep freeze paralyzed the state this week, a senior congressman said on Sunday.
Millions of Texans were subjected to blackouts while the cold weather oppressed an unprepared state network, by a project independent of federal supervision. The outages contributed to dozens of deaths and a crisis of safe access to water that continued despite rising temperatures.
On Saturday, President Joe Biden declared a major disaster, freeing up funds to help. On Sunday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told ABC’s This Week program that the president was “looking forward to going to Texas and showing his support.” But she also said that Biden was “very aware of the fact that it is not a light footprint for a president to travel to a disaster area” and “does not want to draw resources or attention”.
There has been a proliferation of reports that some Texans whose power has remained are now facing huge bills as private companies seek to capitalize. The New York Times reported a case in which a 63-year-old military veteran living on social security in the Dallas suburbs faced an electricity bill of nearly $ 17,000, 70 times what he would normally pay for all public services combined.
“There is nothing I can do about it,” Scott Willoughby told the newspaper, “but it is breaking me.”
Texas Republican Michael McCaul, former chairman of the House’s internal security committee, spoke to CNN’s State of the Union.
“The current plans with the federal assistance account are to help the owners both fix it, because we have a lot of water leakage, a lot of water damaging burst pipes, but also [pay] your electricity bills too, ”he said.
Hostess Dana Bash challenged him, saying, “I hear you say that the federal government is going to help rescue and pay the bills in a state that is partly in this mess because it wants to separate from the federal government. This is kind of rich, don’t you think? “
McCaul dodged the question, saying that Texas needed to prepare for more extreme weather events instead. The deep freeze, he said, was “just a preview of what to expect if the United States does not face the climate crisis head on.”
The disaster declaration issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or Fema, was applied to 77 of Texas’ 254 counties, prompting Governor Greg Abbott to say it should cover the entire state.
Psaki said: “What happens here is that the governor has requested a federal disaster declaration. The president asked his team to expedite this. And Fema has determined where … it must focus its immediate resources, where the most affected counties so they can be sure they will reach the people who need them most.
“It means not only getting people through this emergency, but also getting people through recovery, people who don’t have water, they don’t have heating, they need a place to stay for a while, that’s what this declaration of great disaster help to solve, or that is our hope. “
McCaul was asked about comments in which former Texas governor and US energy secretary Rick Perry said, “Texans would be without electricity for more than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.”
McCaul said, “Energy sharing would have been useful if we could share it with other energy networks.” This could not happen, he said, because the Texas power grid “was created … to be independent of federal supervision and regulations. This is very good with things like cybersecurity, not so good when it comes to an arctic explosion like this.
“In 2011, the state legislature, after we had a really bad freeze, published a bipartisan report with recommendations for energy companies on how to prepare our operations for the winter.”
These recommendations were not followed.
“So when that happened, our entire energy system was not adapted for winter to temperatures below zero degrees,” said McCaul. “That’s what we’re going to take a look at, these recommendations that were made in 2011.”
McCaul was also asked about the efforts of prominent Democrats, including Beto O’Rourke and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the first in El Paso but the last in New York, to help ordinary Texans. These actions contrasted with the behavior of Republicans, including Senator Ted Cruz, who flew to Mexico with his family instead of staying at his Houston home, a move for which he was criticized.
“I think we need to help too,” said McCaul, “and we will do so with the federal emergency declaration we received from the president. But I think it’s great that they are crossing party lines to help Americans first, not just Republicans or Democrats.
“… I know that some are suffering. Like, when a crisis hits my state, I’m there. I am not going on vacation. I know that Mr. Cruz calls this a mistake and he confessed it. But I think it was a big mistake. “