As the days to the election tick down, the speed and the fury of allegations hurled between the Donald Trump and the Kamala Harris camps will explode. Parsing the truth will become harder and harder for those few who remain undecided on the race. The louder the accusations get, the less they’ll have to do with reality.

The latest fracas is Trump’s allegation that the Biden-Harris administration has “stolen” funds meant for natural disaster relief to deal with the man-made crisis at the border in which millions of immigrants flooded our country in large part because the Biden-Harris administration loosened Trump-era asylum restrictions.

Out there to help us all is a legion of fact-checkers who, with one voice, have told us it is not true.

Well, it is a little more complicated than that. Of course, the garbage that Trump uttered — through a combination of age, incompetence and malice — is false. Nothing was “stolen.” But the Federal Emergency Management Agency, tasked with responding to disasters of all kinds and at the head of the response to hurricanes, did spend hundreds of millions of dollars on housing, feeding and otherwise caring for migrants mostly here on flimsy pleas for asylum. If that money was not spent on immigrants, it would be there to help care for those in need as Milton crushes Florida.

Why did FEMA waste that money you might ask? Congress told them to. This year, Congress gave FEMA $650 million for just that, with smaller amounts in previous years, totaling around the $1 billion Trump was talking about. If that money had not been spent on immigrants, in a gray area of the law, the Biden-Harris administration would have been able to “reprogram” it to use on urgent hurricane relief which threatens to deplete FEMA’s appropriation for that purpose.

How do I know that? Presidents spend money on something other than what Congress intended all the time. Earlier this year, the Biden-Harris administration got into a tiff with Texas when Biden decided he wouldn’t spend $1.4 billion Congress appropriated for border protection so he could spend it on something else.

And Biden isn’t very prissy about mangling federal budget laws when the boss wants to do something. The Biden-Harris administration tried to spend $400 billion on forgiving student loans that Congress did not appropriate, leading the Supreme Court to smack the effort down.

Trump knows this because his administration did it, too — reprogramming billions intended to give U.S. soldiers better housing, among other things, to build his border wall.

Funnily enough, when Trump was in charge, his administration did something worse than the accusations he’s made against Democrats: His administration drained money out of FEMA’s disaster relief accounts so that it could spend it on caring for immigrants of dubious legality.

Here’s the thing. Our federal government budget is deep in the red. The appalling numbers that you do see are smaller than the real problem. For instance, the government hides the real extent of annual deficits and the total debt by borrowing from Social Security. Washington tells you we are $35 trillion in debt when we are more realistically $50 trillion or more in debt when you consider the trillions we’ve borrowed from government trust funds and what we should have set aside to pay pension obligations through Social Security and other programs.

Harris and Trump have both proposed making those problems worse to the tune of trillions in spending and tax cuts. Trump’s proposals are twice as bad as Harris’ and hers is the most fiscally reckless plan a Democratic presidential candidate has ever proposed in a general election.

While the two of them squabble over a billion here and a billion there, neither one is serious about the budget. We’re not broke because newcomers are stealing our hurricane relief money. The reality is we’re broke because both of our presidential candidates want to spend even more money that we don’t have. Everything else is just details.

David Mastio, a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star Opinion correspondent. Follow him on X: @DavidMastio or email him at [email protected]

This story was originally published October 10, 2024, 6:18 AM.

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