In late September, just over a week after winds of 155 miles per hour flattened homes and struck down power lines and more than 30 inches of rain inundated parts of the island of Puerto Rico, a leader of the recovery efforts with the Army Corps of Engineers offered his blunt assessment of the damage.

“This is a massive undertaking, one in which I don’t think we’ve undertaken before in terms of this magnitude,” Col. James DeLapp told CNN. The closest thing he could think of by way of comparison? “When the Army Corps led the effort to restore … electricity in the early stages of the Iraq war in 2003 and 2004.”

That was a remarkable observation. It took multiple years and tens of billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq, where DeLapp served as a commander. And now, most everyone in Washington agrees, it’s going to take that kind of lift to remake Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Already, Congress has approved $6 billion to help the island, and much more money is on the way.

“Without unprecedented levels of help from the United States government, the recovery we were planning for will fail,” Natalie A. Jaresko, the executive director of a board created by Congress that oversees the island’s finances, told the House Natural Resources Committee last month. A week later, the island requested a whopping $94.4 billion in additional aid — some $33 billion more than Texas had requested for its recovery efforts.

When the White House released its latest funding request on Nov. 17 — $44 billion in all — only a fraction in direct aid was designated to the island, prompting widespread criticism. The administration said in its letter to Congress that it is awaiting estimates on damages from both Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands before providing additional funding. But in a boon to advocates, it also stated for the first time that Congress should waive restrictions on reconstruction so Puerto Rico can be built to a better standard than before.