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’s comments on "Fox News Sunday" add to a political messaging battle around the storm, which struck states from Florida to western Virginia and left at least 225 people dead.

President Joe Biden’s administration is combating online misinformation on the government’s disaster response, the White House said in a statement. That includes a “falsehood,” advanced by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, that Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief funds were diverted to immigrants in the U.S. illegally.

Johnson didn’t explicitly address Biden’s request last week for lawmakers to speed up authorization of about $1.6 billion for the Small Business Administration to help rebuild from the hurricane. Florida faces another potential hit as Tropical Storm Milton reached hurricane strength on Sunday.

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

Lawmakers are due to return to session on Nov. 12, a week after Election Day.

The White House said Biden on Sunday ordered another 500 active-duty troops to hard-hit western North Carolina, bringing the total to 1,500 troops, and that the administration has mobilized $137 million in aid to Hurricane Helene survivors “with more to come.”

‘Not untrue’

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 FEMA’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.

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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