Nearly three months after Superstorm Sandy ripped through the East Coast, the U.S. Congress passed a $9.7 billion emergency aid package on Friday to help the victims of the storm.
The Associated Press reported that the money will go towards the National Flood Insurance Program which is to run out of money next week and to the citizens holding insurance claims.
Superstorm Sandy took more than 100 lives and left tens of thousands more homeless.
Rep. Frank LoBiondo, R-N.J., told the BBC, “People are waiting to be paid. They’re sleeping in rented rooms on cots somewhere, and they’re not happy. They want to get their lives back on track, and it’s cold outside. They see no prospect of relief.”
Some members of Congress disagreed with the bill, saying that it would add to the budget deficit. Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., is among them.
“We have to talk seriously about offsets, we can’t take $60 billion off budget, that’s my problem with it,” Huelskamp told the AP.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has already spent $2 billion on meeting immediate needs following the superstorm in more than ten states.
The bill was passed in Congress at a vote of 354-67, while the U.S. Senate approved the bill unanimously.
The original bill passed in the Senate had proposed about $60 billion to go towards emergency aid, but House Republicans protested and cut the amount, saying some of the projects had nothing to do with Sandy, the AP reported.
“While it is never too late to do the right thing, it is late that we are doing this thing. And we are only doing the bare minimum,” Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said in a statement.
As a result of moves by the Republicans in the House, the $60 billion dollar request was broken up into two votes. The second vote will be on a more than $51 billion emergency aid package, and will be held Jan. 15, 2013.
