Greg Brudnicki usually spends his work week in Panama City, Florida, where he’s the mayor. But last week, he traveled to Washington, D.C., to ask Congress for help, because the city he’s in charge of is dying.

In October of last year, Panama City was ground zero for the fourth-strongest tropical storm in U.S. history. Hurricane Michael, which made landfall with maximum wind speeds of 160 miles per hour and was recently upgraded to a Category 5 storm, ripped more than 1 million trees out of the ground in Panama City alone last October. “We’re a tree city,” Brudnicki told me. “So they were just flying through the air like missiles.”

Those missiles took aim at the homes and businesses of Panama City’s 36,000 residents. After the storm passed, the ground was covered in more than 4 million cubic yards of debris. That may be hard to visualize. Imagine 45 billion eggs’ worth of rotting debris.

Brudnicki and the city manager, Mark McQueen, knew the debris needed to be cleaned up quickly, or else people would start to leave Panama City. “All of that has to be cleaned up before you can rebuild your housing, and restart your economic engine,” he said. But the bill—$150 million—was too high for a city with an annual operating budget of only $90 million and only $13 million in savings. Even with a bank loan and assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the city only had about $100 million. And the entire recovery, they estimated, would cost $300 million.

So shortly after Hurricane Michael, Panama City officials asked Congress to appropriate some money for debris cleanup and general recovery. Seven months later, Congress has yet to oblige. Lawmakers aren’t picking on Panama City, specifically; they have yet to pass a bill funding disaster relief for anywhere affected by the hurricane, which caused 49 deaths and more than $5.5 billion in damage—not Florida, not Georgia, not the Carolinas. Congress also hasn’t allocated disaster relief funding for the historic floods in the Midwest. Victims of the deadly 2018 wildfires in California are still waiting, too.