(CNN) Less than two weeks after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, President Donald Trump took to the island to praise the federal officials in charge of the recovery efforts and declare they could be "proud" that the death toll had climbed to just 16 people.

"Every death is a horror -- but if you look at a real catastrophe, like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here with, really, a storm that was just totally overpowering -- nobody has ever seen anything like this," Trump said then. "Everybody around this table and everybody watching can really be very proud of what's taken place in Puerto Rico."

Two weeks later, he gave his administration a 10 out of 10 for its response in Puerto Rico.

Even then, Trump's comments struck many as tone deaf. The US territory's 3.5 million residents still lacked access to potable water and nearly all the island lacked electricity. Local officials and others on the ground were already sounding the alarm and critics were calling attention to an all-too-slow pace of the recovery efforts.

But now, the government of Puerto Rico is revising the 64-person death toll it declared in December, estimating that more than 1,400 people died as a result of the devastating hurricane -- or 400 short of Hurricane Katrina's death toll -- raising questions about the effectiveness of the federal response to the hurricane and its aftermath.

Read More