US and Puerto Rican flags wave next to a highway 30 in eastern Puerto Rico, on September 29, 2017. US military and emergency relief teams ramped up their aid efforts for Puerto Rico amid growing criticism of the response to the hurricanes which ripped through the Caribbean island. | Hector Retalmal/AFP/Getty Images white house Trump White House stonewalls as Puerto Rico aid runs dry The president's theories about how the storm-wracked island is using disaster relief money could have dire consequences for its residents.

Call it Donald Trump’s second wall; only this time the president’s target is not migrants coming north but dollars going south to help storm-tossed Puerto Rico.

Food aid for the island’s poor will soon run out without supplemental funds opposed by the White House. At the same time, billions of dollars in community development appropriations have yet to leave Washington — a year after being approved by Congress to assist in the recoveries from hurricanes Maria and Irma.


Next to the government shutdown and bitter fight over immigration policy, Puerto Rico’s plight remains an afterthought to many in Washington. But the big common denominator is Trump’s high profile and the fact that low-income, often Latino families are feeling the crunch — even as U.S. citizens.

Republicans wince; Democrats seethe.

“The territories have long been treated badly, like they’re not part of the American family,” Rep. Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.), who was born on Puerto Rico, said. “But Trump takes it to a new level of meanness.”

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Beyond dollars and cents, two explanations are offered for the president’s stance.

One is his fixation on Puerto Rico’s substantial debt and the notion that bond holders will profit from disaster aid. The second goes to the rawer stuff of Florida politics—a state important to Trump’s base and the site of closely fought elections this past year.

In an October tweet, the president triggered an outcry when he accused Puerto Rico’s “inept” leaders of trying to use “the massive and ridiculously high” amount of disaster aid to pay off the commonwealth’s high debts. Independent observers said there was no factual basis for the president’s claim. Puerto Rico's advocates were baffled further since Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had been counted as an ally for the island in working through some aid issues.

Nonetheless, when the White House was asked this week if this was still the president’s mindset, there was no backing down. “I refer you back to the president’s tweet. Beyond that, we will not be commenting,” a spokesperson said.

What’s certain is the administration warned Senate Democrats in advance that the president would not tolerate anything more for Puerto Rico in a disaster aid bill now pending in Congress. And when the White House opted to include $12.7 billion in disaster aid as a carrot for Democrats in its border wall funding bill, it first took the scalpel to the $1.3 billion in aid for Puerto Rico proposed by the House Appropriations Committee.

Yet bigger than Trump’s Puerto Rico bonds fixation, some say, is Florida politics.

By this account, the president remains furious with Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello for backing Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) who only narrowly lost to Trump’s choice, former Republican Gov. Rick Scott, in the 2018 midterms.

“The driver of the new heightened toxicity is the election, is Rossello endorsing Bill Nelson,” said one close observer. “That was it. You have a president basically going at it like we were in a Third World country.”

Cesar Conda, former chief of staff to Florida’s senior Republican senator, Marco Rubio, said Trump has done more for Puerto Rico than he gets credit for, and Republicans like Rubio are working behind the scenes to ease the tension. But the political concerns are real: “We Republicans, who know Florida, are very concerned about how the president is being perceived among Puerto Ricans who live in the I-4 Corridor,” Conda said, referring to an east-west battleground swath of the swing state.

As if on cue, the newly minted Sen. Scott made a splash Thursday when he went to the Senate floor vowing to be a champion for Puerto Rico and fight for the $600 million in food aid cut by Trump. It was Scott’s maiden speech, and he punctuated his remarks by closing in Spanish: “As a Senator, I will fight for the families of Puerto Rico and work to ensure that Puerto Rico is treated fairly.”

Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) has gone along with the administration’s Puerto Rico strategy but straddled the fence when it came to Trump’s charges in his October tweet.

“To your question, the information we have gathered at this point is mainly anecdotal,” Shelby said, when asked about the issue given his years on the Senate Banking Committee. “We don’t know for sure, but a lot of people believe that may be the case. We need to stay on this and continue to do oversight, and we will.”

Going forward, each of the appropriations in jeopardy — $600 million in food aid and approximately $700 million for clean water grants and community development funds — speaks to the uphill fight facing Puerto Rico.

The food aid, for example, exposes how much the island’s poor are already disadvantaged because they don’t receive the same food stamp benefits as other U.S. citizens, including residents of the Virgin Islands, only about 50 miles east in the Caribbean.

That’s because of budget cuts enacted under former President Ronald Reagan; the food stamp program was under assault in the 1980s and Puerto Rico became a sacrificial lamb for Congress given the high costs there and a history of abuses over the prior decade.

Beginning in 1982, the island was cut out of the food stamps entitlement, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and forced to live with a more rigid, cheaper block grant program. Through the years since, Congress has approved increased funding for those annual grants, the Nutrition Assistance Program. But poor families on Puerto Rico are at a decided disadvantage when comparing NAP with SNAP.

Historically, NAP benefits are significantly lower. Thousands of families below the poverty line are left uncovered, all at a time while the Agriculture Department’s own reports show rising food costs on Puerto Rico. Even before Maria, for example, it was estimated that the average household on Puerto Rico was spending 9 percent more on food in 2013 than the average American household.

What’s more, as a block grant, NAP lacks the flexibility to respond to a spike in demand for aid after a disaster. An entitlement like SNAP can fill needs much more quickly, and the added cost is not counted as disaster aid subject to a new appropriations.

Mindful of this, Congress approved $1.27 billion more for NAP in early 2018 to provide emergency relief and bolster the economy. The goal was to improve benefits and enroll more households below the poverty line. But from the outset, the Trump administration warned this was only a temporary patch; Puerto Rico’s government hoped it could become a path to permanent reform.

Those visions are now colliding. Records show Puerto Rico has been burning through the $1.27 billion at a monthly rate of about $100 million since last March. A senior administration official, citing benefit estimates for February, said this pattern continues today. The result, he said, is a funding cliff made worse because San Juan has not lived up to plans to taper down the spending of the benefits.

Carlos Mercader, executive director the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, said this argument is unrealistic.

“We are still in a recovery process and families are still suffering from the results of the hurricane,” he said. “As U.S. citizens, we just want to be treated equally.”

Given the continued turmoil on Puerto Rico and the number of families who have left the island, the effects of what will happen after the $1.27 billion runs out is unclear.

With the help of the added funds, Puerto Rico estimates that is has enrolled about 279,000 beneficiaries who were not covered previously. But as a practical matter, the total number of NAP participants is now about 1.35 million adults and children, about 120,000 more than in March 2018. That means some of those threatened by the fiscal cliff have already dropped off NAP’s rolls or left the island.

Nonetheless, the effects will be substantial. Puerto Rico will be forced to cut off families and slash benefits for more than 1 million people. The $600 million in supplemental spending is estimated to be sufficient until the end of the fiscal year, giving time for a fuller debate.

The second big appropriation in contention — about $700 million for clean water and community development funds — lacks the human face of NAP and food aid. But proponents say these dollars are precisely the type of extra assistance needed if Puerto Rico is to rebuild in a fashion that surpasses its past, often inadequate, standards, and to make the island more resilient to future storms.

New York City, New Jersey and Houston have used the same “resiliency” funds when rebuilding after devastating storms. But Puerto Rico can’t command the same clout and complains of being slow walked by the White House.

Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff and the director of the Office of Management and Budget, is a central player in this drama. And the recent resignation of Pam Patenaude as deputy secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development exposed rifts in the administration over its approach to Puerto Rico.

In a Nov. 29 letter to Mulvaney, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, joined with Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N. Y.) in pressing Mulvaney to free up aid funds that have sat idle for the past year.

“You cannot argue that additional resources are unnecessary for Puerto Rico’s recovery because they have yet to utilize the resources already appropriated, when you are the principal factor preventing the federal resources from becoming available,” the senators wrote. “OMB has been at the helm of this dysfunction and contrived bureaucratic issues. … It is critical that the recovery phase of this disaster be met with a sense of urgency, which surpasses the speed of typical bureaucracy, and sympathy with the unique challenges that Puerto Rico faces.”

Two months later, there has been no response.

