Up First from NPR - Florida Cleanup, Economic Outlook, Congress Returns

Episode Date: September 2, 2023

President Biden is visiting communities in Florida embarking on cleanup efforts after Hurricane Idalia. Unemployment ticked up, counterintuitively due to the continuing strength of the jobs market. Congress heads back to Capitol Hill next week.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

All the walls have to be gutted, we've got electrical problems, just all kinds of things. Cleanup coming into focus after Hurricane Idalia. As President Biden heads down to view the damage. I'm Scott Simon. I'm Ayesha Roscoe and this is Up First from NPR News. The president is scheduled to leave this morning. He'll tour the area's hardest hit. The pace of hiring has cooled, but employers are still adding to their rosters and wages are climbing. We'll take a look behind this week's jobs numbers.

And Congress comes back to the Capitol next week with the government shutdown looming. Again, will they keep the lights on? Please stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your weekend. President Biden is heading to Florida this morning to view the damage left by Hurricane Idalia and the start of the cleanup. Idalia made landfall on Wednesday as a Category 3 hurricane in the small town of Keaton Beach. It continued to tear through Georgia and the Carolinas before going out to sea. So far, Florida officials have confirmed that Idalia is responsible for a relative handful of deaths. As member of station WSS Stephanie Columbini has discovered, things could have been much worse. She joins us now from Tampa. Thanks so much for being with us.

Thank you. Florida's second time dealing with a major hurricane in less than a year. How are people handling it? You know, we're just weeks away from the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Ian. That was a Category 4 when it hit southwest Florida and also went on to affect much of the state. And so I think people are relieved to see the destruction after this storm isn't as bad. Ian was responsible for about 150 deaths last year. It caused over $100 billion in damage, and many residents are still struggling to recover. One of the big differences is where Ian hit. Ian was in a populated area of the state,

whereas Adalia hit Florida's Big Bend. It's also known as the nature coast, so it's more rural, small fishing villages and forests. And so in the big picture, Adalia not being as destructive, it's of course a good thing, but anytime there's a loss of life or property, it's painful. And Stephanie, you're in Tampa. Once again, Spirit, a direct hit. But a lot of problems with flooding. What did you see? You know, one of the challenges with the dahlia was that even though the eyewall was far off the coast when it passed the Tampa area, it came as we're experiencing what are known as king tides, basically higher than normal tides. But so a lot of people woke up Wednesday morning thinking they were in the clear, and then the storm surge

flooding started to pour in. So I talked with a man named Kevin Bunt. He lives near the beach, about an hour north of Tampa in Hernando County. Bunt stayed with a relative in an elevated home to avoid the water. It just kept coming up, we watched the mailbox disappear and then it came back. That was when the tides receded. You know, Bunt's own house ended up getting about three feet of water in it. Some businesses were also hit hard. Catherine Buren, she sells local seafood to restaurants in the area and her building had a lot of damage. I stopped by there while she was cleaning up. All the walls have to be gutted. We've got electrical problems, panels that are going to cost $6,000 to replace, just all kinds of things. Stephanie, what kind of help are the folks there getting?

Well, President Biden approved Florida's disaster declaration on Thursday, and that makes federal money available to help residents in seven of the hardest-hit counties with things like temporary housing or home repairs. But Governor Ron DeSantis says he plans to ask the White House to include more counties in that declaration. The governor also activated a $20 million emergency loan program for small businesses in 25 counties. You know, it's going to take some time to properly assess the damage across the state, and people are still cleaning up this weekend. And applying for aid could also be challenging for some people who live in the rural areas that were hit hardest by Adalia.

Stephanie Colambini with WUSF in Tampa, thanks so much for being with us. Thanks. To the economy now. The jobs market's hot, but not as hot as it has been. The Labor Department says employers added 187,000 jobs last month. It also revised job gains for June and July lower. That's more or less what the Federal Reserve has been hoping for as it raised interest rates in an effort to try to cool the economy and curb inflation. The unemployment rate ticked up last month to 3.8 percent, still very low by historical standards. NPR chief economics correspondent Scott Horsley joins us now. Scott, thanks so much for being with us.

Good to be with you, Scott. So how much is hiring going down? Yeah, these numbers bounce around a lot from month to month. But if you average out the whole summer, employers added about 150,000 jobs each month in June, July, and August. That's less than half the pace of job growth we saw in the first three months of the year. So there has been a slowdown, which is not surprising. Employers are no longer playing catch-up for jobs that were lost in the pandemic. They're just adding workers as they need them. We do continue to see hiring in health care and

hospitality and construction. Construction companies added about 22,000 workers despite the jump in mortgage rates. Most of those new construction workers are not building houses, though. They're working on commercial buildings or big public works projects. And the unemployment rate rose last month from 3.5% to 3.8%. Does this worry economists? Not really. The unemployment rate comes from a separate survey of households. And what it showed in August was that more than 700,000 people started looking for work that month.

Not all of them found jobs right away, so the unemployment rate inched up. But it's still under 4 percent, where it's been for more than a year and a half. Speaking in the White House Rose Garden yesterday, President Biden cheered the fact that so many people are now in the workforce. People are coming off the sidelines, getting back to their workplaces. Job satisfaction is higher than it's been in 36 years. And the share of working-age people who are in the job market is now the highest it's been since 2002.

And Scott, the extra paychecks ought to enhance the broader economy, right? They certainly help. You know, more people are working and they're earning more money. Average wages in August were up 4.3% from a year ago, which should be enough to outpace inflation. All those paychecks do help to keep the consumer engine going, but there is some question how long we can keep revving that engine. Earlier this week, the Commerce Department reported

that personal spending grew four times as fast in July as personal income did. Nancy Vandenhouten, who's with Oxford Economics, says that can't go on indefinitely. There are a lot of reasons to believe that the consumer is going to run out of steam. Savings are being depleted. I think it's going to be harder for some households to continue to borrow. And then we have the wild card at the end of student loan forbearance coming. And I think that will eat into consumer spending a bit as well. Those student loan repayments start up next month. And if people do dial back their spending, we could certainly see a further slowdown in job growth.

Of course, on Labor Day weekend, we have to ask about organized labor. And I want to ask you specifically, the strike by Hollywood actors and writers had a cameo in this month's job report, didn't it? That's right. The motion picture business lost about 17,000 jobs last month, which the Labor Department attributes to the writers and actors strike. The auto workers union has also authorized a strike against the big three car makers when their contract expires later this month. If that comes to pass, you could see a much bigger loss of jobs, although it probably wouldn't show up until later in the fall. Unions do feel like they're in a strong bargaining position. They've won some big gains at UPS and the airlines.

Of course, nine out of ten workers in the U.S. is not in a union, and for them, their best leverage is a strong job market. And Pierre Scott Horsley, thanks so much. You're welcome. Congress returns to Washington, D.C. next week after lawmakers were home for a month-long summer recess. They have a lot in front of them. First up, a fight over government funding that could trigger a shutdown. Mitch McConnell, the top Senate Republican, summed it up this way. Honestly, it's a pretty big mess. McConnell faces a big test. He froze again at a public event, raising questions about his fitness to serve as leader.

And House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is facing calls from his right flank to move to impeach President Biden. NPR congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh joins us now. Hey, Aisha. Hey. So is Congress going to be able to avoid a shutdown? You know, they don't have a lot of time. And as the tradition is in Washington, Congress is leaving important things pretty much to the last minute. The problem is this House and Senate aren't working off the same math and they haven't agreed to even one of the dozen annual spending bills they need to pass. The debt ceiling deal that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Biden negotiated back in May set overall spending levels for the fiscal year, but a group of House

conservatives who didn't like that deal forced McCarthy to craft bills at a lower spending level. The Senate is working on the outline from the debt ceiling deal. So the two chambers are really on basically a collision course. McCarthy, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and the White House do agree that some type of short-term spending bill is needed to avoid a shutdown. They're talking about passing what's called a continuing resolution, or CR, to keep federal agencies funded through sometime in early December. So beyond keeping the lights on at federal agencies, what else are they working on? The two big things are disaster aid and money for Ukraine.

The Biden administration sent up an emergency funding request earlier this summer, initially asked for $12 billion for FEMA to respond to natural disasters. They need $4 billion more. They've asked for that since the fires in Maui and Hurricane Adalia swept through the southeastern coastal states. The White House also wants $20 billion for Ukraine, but there's a block of House conservatives who oppose any more money. So it'll be tough for the leaders to get that through. So the leaders on Capitol Hill, specifically the top Republicans, are facing different challenges. Let's talk about McConnell first.

Like, how's he doing following that episode in Kentucky? The Capitol physician, Brian Monahan, cleared McConnell to work and said after consulting with him and his neurology team, the 81-year-old senator could continue his schedule as planned. McConnell had a fall back in March and suffered a concussion. And Dr. Monahan said that lightheadedness is a symptom after recovering from a concussion. But these two public episodes of freezing, one in July, one in this week, have really been jarring. And Senate Republican colleagues so far are supporting McConnell, but there are continuing questions about how serious his health issues are. He hasn't answered the question about whether he's going to run for re-election in 2026,

but Senate Republicans want to regain control of the chamber in 2024. And there's now new questions about whether McConnell can remain leader of his party in the Senate. And what about House Speaker Kevin McCarthy? He has a razor-thin majority, and conservatives want to impeach President Biden. So is that going to move ahead? It does seem likely that impeachment will move in the House. McCarthy has increasingly talked more about launching an impeachment inquiry. But House Republicans haven't uncovered any evidence of any wrongdoing by President Biden. Some are alleging corruption around his son, Hunter Biden's business dealings when Biden was vice president. But these House committee

chairmen that are pushing impeachment haven't produced any evidence that the president received any financial benefit. You know, Republicans in the House are split. There are moderates who don't think it's a good idea to move ahead without some justification or evidence. But other allies of former President Trump, especially after the recent indictments over the summer, are really eager when the Congress comes back this fall to impeach President Biden. It's unclear whether McCarthy will call a vote to launch something formally because he really doesn't have the votes right now to pass that. But the committees could go ahead and continue to do the work to potentially draft these articles of impeachment. You know, I think based on McCarthy's recent comments that it's the natural next step to do an inquiry,

it's really a question of when, not if, they move forward. That's NPR's Deirdre Walsh. Thank you so much. Thank you, Aisha. And that's it first for Saturday, September 2nd, 2023. I'm Scott Simon. And I'm Aisha Roscoe. This Saturday version of the podcast was produced by Andrew Craig, Lennon Sherburn, and Fernando Naro-Roman. Susanna Capilouto, Rafael Nam, Christian Dev-Calamore, Lucy Perkins, Dee Parvez, and Ed McNulty edited. Our director is Michael Radcliffe with engineering support from Hannah Glovda.

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