Tractor pumps water from a flooded field in Antelope County, Nebraska on May 5, 2019.
Credit: Johannes Eisele/ Getty
The federal government is ill-prepared to shoulder what could be a trillion-dollar fiscal crisis associated with extreme weather, floods, wildfires and other climate disasters through 2100, federal investigators have found.
In the latest of a series of reports, the Government Accountability Office says that costs of disaster assistance to taxpayers since 2005 have swelled to nearly $500 billion—and they keep getting higher.
“The federal budget, however, does not generally account for disaster assistance provided by Congress or the long-term impacts of climate change on existing federal infrastructure and programs,” GAO found in the 16-page report, which was presented as testimony to Congress by Alfredo Gómez, director of the office’s natural resources and environment team.
Moreover, the government “does not have certain information needed by policymakers to help understand the budgetary impacts of such exposure,” GAO found.
The findings follow a dramatic escalation in federal spending on disaster assistance since 2005. Much of that money—upward of $450 billion—has been appropriated under […]
I said to friends at the beginning of his reign that trump could/would bankrupt the country and I am not surprised by any of this. Wise leadership would be planning for the future using real life data but no, we have the worst most incompetent people at the helm. Got rid of Carter for Ray-gun and Gore for W setting us up for the knockout punch, the end of empires is messy.
Very scary for those of us who depend on social security and care about the future of the natural world.
I totally agree with you Will. Cutting taxes is the worst thing we could do when we need more money in the treasury for climate change and for saving the species on the planet which we are destroying at an alarming rate; not to mention the lack of enough money to survive for senior citizens who depend upon Social Security in this ever-increasingly costly world we live in.