House Speaker Mike Johnson said Hurricane Helene’s devastation doesn’t require immediate action by Congress to boost federal disaster relief funding because it’ll take time to assess the damage.

Johnson didn’t explicitly address a request by President Joe Biden last week for lawmakers to speed up authorization of about $1.6 billion for the Small Business Administration to help rebuild from the hurricane that struck parts of six states.

“You send specific needs and requests based on the actual damages, and that takes some time especially with storms of this magnitude,” Johnson said on "Fox News Sunday." "So Congress will do its job.”

Lawmakers are due to return to session on Nov. 12, a week after the U.S. elections. At least 225 people died in Hurricane Helene and many others have been displaced. Florida is bracing for another potentially dangerous and costly hurricane as Tropical Storm Milton is forecast to build into a hurricane.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has assailed Biden on the campaign trail for the administration’s storm response and falsely claimed that federal disaster funding was stolen to help people in the U.S. illegally.

The former president appears to be conflating the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster relief fund, which can’t be used for other purposes, with a program, established by Congress in 2022, when the agency was asked to help communities experiencing an influx of migrants.

Claims that FEMA disaster response funding “was diverted to support international efforts or border-related issues” are false, the agency said on its website Friday.

Johnson acknowledged the discrepancy, while saying FEMA shouldn’t use “any pool of money from any account for resettling illegal aliens who have come across the border.”

“The streams of funding are different — that is not an untrue statement, of course,” Johnson told Fox News.

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