Speaking of FEMA's budget, in 2011 the GOP-controlled House Appropriations Committee proposed cutting FEMA's budget by $87 million. In 2012 they proposed an additional $182 million in cuts. Mother Jones reported in August that Paul Ryan's much-talked about budget proposal, while not making specific mention of FEMA, calls for cuts in discretionary spending that would necessarily scale back federal disaster relief budgets drastically.

And who can forget the government-shutdown fiasco of 2011 which centered, in part, on Republican demands (led by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA)) that spending on disaster relief be offset by spending cuts elsewhere?