Trump administration | Chris Aldrich

Listened to FEMA Time from On the Media | WNYC Studios

As Hurricane Florence bears down, we discover that FEMA has $10 million less in its budget. The money was siphoned off to pay for detention and removal of immigrants.

On Wednesday, as Florence swirled ominously off the coast of the Carolinas, and states prepared for imminent disaster, Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) thought it would be a good time to draw everyone’s attention to the shifting priorities of this administration. Specifically, he released a budget that showed the Department of Homeland Security had transferred nearly 10 million dollars from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to pay for detention and removal operations.

FEMA officials maintain that the smaller budget won’t hinder their operations, but as wildfires rage and hurricanes make landfall, they have a lot on their plate. We don't think about FEMA much, until that's all we think about. Historian Garrett Graff says the agency’s, quote, “under-the-radar nature” was originally a feature, not a bug. Graff wrote about "The Secret History of FEMA" for Wired last September and he spoke to Bob about the agency's Cold War origins as civil defense in the event of a nuclear attack and how it transitioned to "natural" disaster response. Plus, they discuss the limitations to FEMA's capabilities and why it has such a spotty record. Graff is also author of Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself -- While The Rest of Us Die.

Read White House distances itself from reports that Trump could target Facebook, Google and Twitter with a new executive order by Tony Romm and Josh Dawsey (Washington Post)

Trump slams Google for 'RIGGED' results

The White House sought to distance itself Saturday from reports that President Trump is considering an executive order that would subject tech giants like Facebook, Google and Twitter to federal investigations into alleged political bias.

For weeks, top tech companies have been on edge, fearing that the Trump administration could seek to regulate the industry in response to the president’s tweets attacking social media sites for silencing conservatives online. Their worst suspicions seemed to come true Friday night, with the emergence of a draft executive order that called for nearly every federal agency to study how companies like Facebook police their platforms and refer instances of “bias” to the Justice Department for further study.