- Attorney General Jeff Jackson files multiple lawsuits to preserve federal funding of state education and storm preparedness programs, and state elections officials begin searching for voters with incomplete voter registrations.

This is "State Lines."

- [Announcer] Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

[bright music] ♪ - Hey here, we're just chattering here pre-show.

Welcome to "State Lines," everyone.

Come on in, have a seat for the next half hour, joining me are some great folks that I've been wanting to talk to about the week's events.

Recovering journalist Travis Fain is here as political analyst.

Hello Travis.

- Hello, nice to be here.

- [Kelly] You've not convinced Reporter Dawn Vaughn to come over to that side of the world, but she is an active journalist and a good one for "The News and Observer."

Hi Dawn.

- Hi, glad to be here.

- Pretty good insurance commissioner, knows how to win a race or three.

Mike Causey is here with the Insurance Commissioner's office, and we is the commish.

Good to have you.

- Good to be with you, Kelly.

- You ready to go?

- I'm ready.

Let's go.

- No matter what topics I throw at you and all right.

All right, Chris Sinclair out of Charlotte.

Public relations, recovering political analyst, I don't know, campaign consultant.

What haven't you done?

Well, A lot of issues.

The legislature's sort of fading into the sunset, but state politics, state issues, Travis, still a big deal.

Let's talk about some lawsuits to kick off this show, where Jeff Jackson will top our conversation.

He's filed a couple of lawsuits against the Trump administration.

The Trump administration is freezing nearly 7 billion with a B dollars in federal education funding.

And the advocates will say this funding supports a lot of things.

Afterschool programs, summer programs, services for migrant children.

State Superintendent Mo Green says our state's share of all that frozen funding is about $168 million.

He and the Attorney General went public today saying 1,000 teacher jobs are at risk because the cash was expected on July 1st.

And Travis, the Trump administration says they're freezing these grants and canceling some because it's been misused under the brand of waste, fraud, and abuse.

- Yeah, which is some sort of magical term.

You're the federal government, if there's fraud and abuse prosecuted, if there's waste, that's what Congress is there for, to reallocate the budget.

This is 10% of North Carolina's federal education funding we're talking about.

It's like $300 per pupil.

Jeff Jackson's office said something like 18 million of it was gonna go to counties hit by Helene.

A lot of it hits rural counties as you can imagine, they were more likely to rely on federal funding for education, and both these lawsuits, and particularly this one, it just kind of is whether or not the executive branch has the ability to claw this money back.

And Jeff Jackson's office, the Attorney General's office, and others including me would argue no, that's what Congress does.

And particularly when it was due July 1st and then, you know, they cancel it right at the last second.

- Well Dawn, about the idea, Travis says waste, fraud, and abuse is a magical term.

It is magical.

You say those three words and billions of dollars just vanish.

- I mean nobody likes waste, fraud, and abuse, right?

So if you use that, people are gonna wanna not have it, but this is just another example of the three branches and if you don't like what one branch is doing, you use the other branch to to try to, you know, course correct to what you want.

But I think it's also political.

Jackson is a Democrat, you know, Trump is a Republican, and what you're gonna do, like you have different priorities, but someone's gonna take money that's a priority, particularly for your party, you're gonna try to like preserve that money.

- Mike, voters did vote for cuts to Congress.

They put a congressional majority in their own promise, they elected Donald Trump.

They didn't have to.

But now if you cut federal dollars and these local folks still want their schools funded the way they were funded, you still gotta pay up, it looks like, just at the state level.

- Well, it does create issues, and the waste, fraud, and abuse is real.

And you know, we need to do everything we can to curtail that.

But we had an issue within the Department of Insurance from Federal Cuts earlier this year.

We have a great program, called the Seniors Health Insurance Information Program, or SHIP, which was started back in 1986 under Commissioner Jim Long.

And we've probably helped between two and three million people over those years, and last year helped over 70,000.

And we have 26 people, and 11 of those we are self-funded within the department, and the others are federal funding.

And we got notification that the federal funding may be cut.

So I wrote letters to Congress, we were very concerned about it, but last week on a phone call, that funding was restored.

So sometimes when these cuts are announced, it may be for a good reason and it later gets restored.

- Oh, that's a great question.

Chris, this waste issue, it says freezing.

And I mean, I guess you could lead it to cancellation as part of a degradation of the US Department of Education.

If you're a conservative voter or just a middle of the road voter, how do you take this?

People want that waste outta there.

This can hurt, and it does.

And I also saw where Bullock, auditor Bullock released an audit saying 90% of education funds in North Carolina are to personnel.

You cut anything, you cut jobs, it's going to happen.

- Yeah, I think it's reasonable, look, we live in a world, with the Trump administration and with with Congress, most of Congress, or a lot of Congress, where they are in this mantra of cutting.

And the waste, fraud, and abuse is kind of a line that's thrown out there to bring money back in and look at it.

But look, before we sue, let's look at, are we making good decisions?

Do we need the oversight?

Is it transparent?

All of those things.

Nobody's against after school programs, but.

- [Don] I think some people are.

- Well not everyone, but they shouldn't be, 'cause those are legit.

But you shouldn't demand a blank check from the federal government without any sort of oversight or questions about that.

So let's look at the questions.

If there is some waste and some abuse and the transparency's not there, the little more oversight's needed, let's do that before we automatically sue.

Which to me is more of a political play to your point, Don.

But I think that's, I think it's important that we look at these things before we just automatically file the lawsuit.

- But you can also do all that looking at funding and how, have more oversight of it before you cut things.

And I think with politics, it's interesting that, one party saying like, we need to cut this, this is a waste, but then they're spending money on other things.

And that's Democrats and Republicans.

So it's their own perspective of what they think is wasteful versus what somebody else says.

- And you notice they don't ever give you a list of the waste, fraud and abuse.

They say waste, fraud and abuse and it's like, all right, well, can we get a list of that?

- It works, Travis.

It works very well to say that.

- It shouldn't work.

- Well let's talk about the other lawsuit.

I'll go back to you, Michael, on this one, or Chris.

Why'd I call you Mike?

Mike's to your left.

- [Chris] Not Mike.

- Chris Sinclair.

All right, we're talking about this lawsuit.

Jeff Jackson's filed another one to, you know, he's fighting to restore federal funding for towns to do things with their sewage plants and rain water, all the infrastructure under the ground.

Protect us against flooding.

Trump halted $200 million in FEMA funding.

Many North Carolina towns were already awarded grants so they could upgrade and relocate wastewater plants or improve rainwater drainage due to recent flood damage.

Those grants were canceled in April.

FEMA did release a press release at the same time saying the grant program should end due to waste, fraud and abuse.

The funds will be returned to a federal disaster recovery fund for use later or given back to the US Treasury, Mr. Sinclair, go.

- Well, I think I have the same sort of view that it, if somebody identified, if it's true, there's some misuse of funds within any of these programs, as important as it is to have recovery funds, and no one's gonna argue that, but if there is some sort of waste or abuse or fraud, then again, before we sue, let's look at that and then at least they put it back into the recovery, the disaster recovery fund.

So you can go back to it.

But again, these are questions that the federal, you know, the administration wants to see and have answered.

And I think it's, I think it's legitimate, but again, it's, to me, it goes back to a political play for Jackson.

- Very similar type of debate on, but you know, Mike, you work with the volunteer firemen, you're out there, these infrastructure projects, how does that weigh in at the state level?

Does to see, you know, these towns, they're ready for a multimillion dollar upgrade and boom, gone.

How does that affect the business of insurance, I should say?

- Well, it's very upsetting to the local municipalities when that happens.

But I don't think that means that the funding will never be there.

And I don't know much about it at all, but some of the things I've heard is, is that the, a lot of the funding was not going where it was truly needed, and it was heavy toward climate change agenda and things like this.

So maybe, hopefully there'll be a revamping and put that dollars to where it needs, because there's tremendous need, especially for these resiliency and the water control, flood control projects that we really need.

- Don a lot of this federal funding is frozen and being reviewed.

Has it been canceled yet?

Some of this has been and been remitted like in this case of rainwater, some flood remediation and whatnot.

- Right some things are down the road, but whenever I hear anything about freezes or cuts at federal funds, I think about the state budget, which, you know, we still don't have yet.

And how if there's suddenly a lot, you know, less money from the federal government with the education money, you know, Wake County school system is already talking about, you know, what are they gonna do.

So everyone's gonna look at the local governments and the state government for any sort of, you know, like ending of money from the federal government.

And, you know, money is all about power and the power dynamics between the levels of government.

And I think this is gonna last for years throughout Trump's entire term For sure and when the midterms come, you know, people are gonna be thinking about when they're voting, what's being cut, what's not.

Although a lot of this federal stuff, the money is not gonna be cut until after the midterms and that seems pretty strategic.

- Yes.

Good politics there.

Travis, however, since COVID, what our US federal deficit was in the hundreds of billions of dollars, now we're up like 1.7, 1.8 trillion.

It's not like the federal government hasn't expanded its spending and there's a, it's appears the world may be getting tired of us savings bonds.

Is that, would that be fairly accurate?

How do we balance our needs and wants versus fiscal responsibility in America?

- The national debt is $37 trillion.

There's no way we cut our way out of this.

We're going to have to do something with taxes too.

And just continuing lower tax rates for the rich that we've had for the last few years that were just extended by the big beautiful bill.

It's just, it's not gonna get it done if you care about that.

This particular cut, 22 million for a pumping station Salisbury that gets flooded, 7 million for Hillsboro to relocate a pump station that within the last week went offline because it was surrounded by flood water.

You mentioned climate change in like my, oh, maybe this is too woke, flooding preparation resilience, that's all climate change.

It's all the exact same issue.

It's just different words that we use for it.

And I mean it, you and I both do work in the insurance industry.

I have some clients there.

The people who believe in climate change the most, I promise you are the banks.

and the insurance companies, and that's why things are getting more expensive.

If we do not deal with this, if we do not mitigate it on the front end, which is what this money is supposed to do, is to prepare us for these things, it just gets more expensive on the back end.

$37 trillion in debt, we can really can't afford that.

- So my question is, during the Biden administration, there was billions and billions of dollars for infrastructure and water and sewer plants, local governments had the ability to go get some of that money, and my understanding was that they weren't moving fast enough to go get that money.

So couldn't some of that money have been spent on some of these things?

I think so, and so the question I have is they had opportunity to go get those funds under the infrastructure plan post-pandemic, did they spend that money on that and did they get that money to do that?

Or is this part of that, I don't know.

- We can go ask Gastonia.

They're losing $6 million here, so we can ask them whether or not they did.

- Maybe we should ask should them.

- Well, one thing about clawbacks is if you spend the money, then it's, y'know, well, I mean, they could make you, like, pay it back, but as far as, like, clawing it back, don't sit on it.

Government works very slow.

If you dilly dally too long, you're gonna lose the money, so if you have the money to spend, come up with your plan, sort it out, and spend the money.

- You better smoke 'em when you got 'em.

- That's a good point.

- Yeah, well, let's talk about Tropical Storm Chantal.

Caused tens of millions of dollars in damage across parts of, I guess, central North Carolina and all the eyes were on the Chapel Hill area.

Governor Stein has issued a state of emergency for 13 counties.

Orange County will dial in on that one.

$56 million in damages alone.

The Governor says the heavy rains that came after the tropical storm passed through have overwhelmed local response.

Orange County suffered nearly $13 million in residential losses, and the report I read, might have been News & Observer, Dawn, estimated 19% of homes were carrying flood insurance and they're protected.

81%, do not scold us, Mike Causey, about insurance.

- Well, I will tell you that's a very high number because I walked the neighborhoods in northern Durham and Scarborough-Chapel Hill areas and talked to a lot of homeowners and a few had flood insurance, but I was really surprised to see the 19%, because when Hurricane Florence hit in 2018, 23 southeastern counties underwater, and less than 2% of those homeowners in coastal North Carolina had flood insurance.

And with Helene, I believe it was less than 3% of the homeowners and a little more on the businesses.

But I would applaud the Triangle Area if it is 19%.

And we really need some way to get flood insurance all across the state on every homeowner's policy.

That's what's really needed.

And for mobile home policies in North Carolina, if you live in a mobile home, those policies automatically cover floods.

And I've been talking some with the Rate Bureau about what could we do to have mandatory flood insurance all across the state, and the big issue is the cost and how to get around that- - I've got a flood policy and it goes up and up and up and it's just one of those things that we hate insurance till we need it, Mr. Causey.

- That's what I hear.

- And Dawn, what do we do with this?

Chantal comes through, it rained for, what, eight, ten hours, just boom, a foot of rain falls.

And we worried about Helene, now the problem crawls east, and we're not even to the fall, and you just have to know there's a tropical storm coming for the coast.

How do we balance all this need?

- Right, well, nothing's getting any cheaper, right?

I mean, it's always gonna- - [Kelly] it's true.

- It's always gonna cost more.

But one thing that I noticed about Governor Stein's state of emergency declaration, in the text of the declaration, it mentions how many consecutive storms that we've had in those days since Chantal and how that's really just kind of piled on and made it worse, but.

- I mean, I think everybody is cautiously optimistic, you know, going into the rest of this year.

But I think Helene taught us that what you think of is gonna happen during hurricane season is not what the result is, you know?

And that's, again, back to the budget, rainy day fund priorities for both the House and Senate where it was putting more money in that rainy day fund.

Clearly the state uses it and needs it.

- How do you share that money, Travis, at the state level?

I didn't see Raleigh spring into action over central North Carolina's flood, and some of those folks are just as affected and just as upset as anyone in the mountains.

- Yeah, and it takes a little time to figure out what is and isn't covered, what is gonna get fixed by the private sector needs government.

I'll echo what the commissioner said, 19% having flood insurance is not just a good number, it was an incredible number.

I was expecting two, 3%.

So that kind of speaks to where it was.

I worry, again, like the commissioner said, that we are getting to a place where we need, but where everybody's gonna have to have flood insurance and it's just one more cost.

And, you know, to return to climate change, this is basic physics, warmer air holds more moisture.

These rain events are going to become more common and they're gonna become more deadly.

We are continuing to build in areas where flooding is more likely.

Some of the faster growing areas, particularly down our coast, Brunswick County, are just more likely to have weather problems, as we head into this period of climate change, where those are gonna become more common.

- Well, Kelly, one thing we need is stronger, tougher building codes, especially in the coastal counties.

And these programs, like the Fortified Roof program that we yesterday announced $20 million more grant money, it's up to $6,000 for inland, but on the outer banks in the barrier islands is up to $10,000- - [Kelly] To replace your roof with a hurricane roof.

- Right.

And this is a project of the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety.

IBHS is located down in Richburg, South Carolina, down below Rock Hill.

But if anybody ever gets a chance to go and visit their facility, they have a what's called a roof farm with hundreds of roofs out in the weather testing them.

And they actually simulate hurricane conditions with their testing and they know how to waterproof a roof and use the hurricane clips and seal, first and second floors and roofs, so they're many times virtually unscathed when a high wind or storm or hurricane.

- Free to call your office about it or email or- - You call the office or the North Carolina Insurance Underwriters Association heads that up.

We have information on our website, NCDOI.gov, and also the IBHS folks have their own website.

But you could look up fortifiedroofsnc.com and get a lot of information.

- Nothing money won't fix, you know?

- Well, the home builders keep freezing building codes.

I mean, they've been very successful at the legislature the last three years in rolling back building codes.

- One thing I'll say about the building code part, there's some, there's no building code in the world that could prepare you for a storm like Helene.

Let's face it, you couldn't invent one.

- [Person] Just don't wash away.

It's gonna wash away.

- So look, I think to the point of resiliency planning, that's what we need in this state in terms of the next storm's coming and what are we doing to educate homeowners so that that 20% becomes 50% or 100%, to your point about statewide?

Resiliency planning, we have these opportunities to do that.

To your point, going down and seeing how things are being built and whatnot, do we do enough of that in the state so that we can be educated because the next storm is coming, and, you know, to keep putting it back into a broken system, if you will, of flood insurance or whatnot.

Is that smart planning?

I think we need a little bit of that.

- Well, we also have private flood insurance available now in North Carolina, and that's something that we need to continue promoting.

And also the problem with the federal flood insurance program is that too few people participate.

So it's heavily in debt.

- People are dropping out and they don't wanna pay the premium 'cause was once in a 100 year flood, Mr.

Cozy, and I won't be around in 100 years.

That's the logic, right?

- Well, that's what the folks in Northern Durham said when the Eno River, when Fran flooded that area.

I believe it was the city of Durham, bought several homes, demolished those homes and put pipes underground, and they told the surrounding neighbors, "You're good for another 100 years."

And one of the homeowners said, "It's not 100 years yet."

[chuckles] - Century ain't what it used to be.

Well, let's keep the cuts coming folks.

Congress approved President Donald Trump's request to cancel nearly $9 billion in federal funding in three key areas, that U.S. AID program that's now under the State Department, as well as funds to local station that support PBS, us, and NPR.

That's Colin Campbell is on the show, I think next week.

Groups like North Carolina's RTI, the Research Triangle Institute with the former name of it, has been hit by federal research, you know, grant reduction, they've laid off folks this past spring, and it's been leading U.S. AID programs globally, and we're affected by the passage of the rescission bill.

And you know, Dawn, I've asked the bosses about this, it happens real fast.

I think it happened as just before we recorded this program late in the work week.

We don't know what we're gonna do yet.

We're gonna survive, I'm told, and move on, but it's leaner.

- Sure.

I think this is a very stressful time for a lot of people, right?

And again, what we are talking about at the top of the show with cuts on when these are gonna happen.

I think a lot of this, we're not gonna see the full ramifications for years, or work in other countries, you know, or work domestically, public media, and what those ramifications are.

And people have short memories, and they'll blame who they want to, if it's like a year, two years later, that sort of thing.

But again, when there are cuts at the federal level, people start looking at the state government and the state budget that's still being worked out, assuming there's one this summer, there are a lot of needs, everything from climate change and weather needs to, you know, funding different groups.

And all of this affects the economy.

All of this affects business.

It affects where people wanna live, where they wanna work, where they want to go to school.

And so I think we're gonna be dealing with this for years.

- The laundry list of perceived needs of this state now at this point, there's been a lot of cuts at the federal level now, but there is no state budget, she's right.

Doesn't seem to be any pressure on state legislators, at least not yet.

- Yeah and I mean, and we've been here before, right?

It just takes time to get a state budget together.

The House and Senate really not working...

According to some people, they're barely talking at the leadership level, at least when it comes to the state budget.

So, you know, give it through the summer, maybe give it through the fall.

- Well, they'll have more time to look at what those needs are from the federal government and, you know, anticipate some things down the road, and, you know, fight about taxes for a little bit longer.

- Yeah, Travis, you said it earlier, $36 trillion in debt.

The interest on that alone is almost a trillion dollars.

And look, everything's on the chopping block under this administration, under Congress, and I don't think it's anti-science, I don't think it's anti-cultural, I think it's just math that- - Well wait now, they did complain about woke philosophies.

I mean, some of it is, and I mean, you know, spare me the thought that $9 billion for PBS and foreign aid is what's gonna get us there.

We spend 900 billion a year on our military.

The Big Beautiful Bill put another 150 billion into that.

It's hard for me to believe that PBS is the problem.

- I got two and a half minutes in this show and I've gotta talk about the elections board, Chris.

They're actively launching a campaign to find between a hundred, 200,000 voters who have that incomplete voter registration data as part of a Supreme Court race, among other things.

North Carolina's facing federal lawsuits by the Trump administration saying you need to clean up your voter, they call it repairing the voter registration rolls.

State Elections Board Executive Director Sam Hayes promises, if you're an eligible voter, you will not be improperly removed from voter rolls.

The State Board of Elections, which is now three Republicans, two Democrats, unanimously supported a plan to collect that missing voter data to get those voters, I guess, legalized by letter of the law, though they did vote in the last election.

And so what do we get out of this?

- Well, I mean, look, it's a bipartisan issue for the Board of Elections, 'cause you had all the Republicans, and the three Republicans, the two Democrats voting unanimously for this.

Everyone, we should have clean voter rolls.

That's just not a question.

And if you look historically, north Carolina's done a pretty good job of cleaning those rolls up.

This is not something new.

I think what's new is making sure the data for the license under voter ID, and if they don't have that, so security numbers, getting that cleaned up.

We're talking about a couple hundred thousand folks, and Sam Hayes has said, look, no one's gonna be removed from this.

We're gonna take precautions.

You know, this is common sense.

We've been doing it.

We're gonna put a finer tip on it, which is needed, and we should have clean rolls.

You know, and when you run a campaign, you want the most accurate data to talk to people.

So getting that, getting this cleaned up is something that is not even remotely controversial in my opinion.

- Commissioner, you have more than a few people filing files with your office over the years.

How easy is it for any government or quasi-governmental agency to just go into its books and clean them up, independent of politics?

Is it easy?

- I wouldn't think it would be so easy.

- You gotta find them too.

- Right.

- Don, where does this go?

Is this going to solve our election crisis that people seem to?

- I don't know.

I feel like, you know, politicians are, you know, always find something to complain about when they're mad about, you know, elections.

You know, also, depending on, you know, how the results of those elections are.

I think eventually we'll get to the point, maybe one day, maybe not in our lifetimes, where everybody runs out of things that are, you know, some sort of hitch that they wanna fix.

- 10 seconds.

Do they find those voters and correct them?

- There's a database online you can search.

I've tried it.

It's not that hard.

They're gonna send you a postcard in August if you need to do something.

- Be optimistic, folks.

Thank you panelists for everything.

Do you have any comments about this show, about what we're talking about?

Email us at statelines@pbsnc.org.

I'm Kelly McCullen.

Thanks for watching.

I'll see you next time.

[inspiring music] - [Announcer] Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.