After Hurricane Harvey made landfall Friday night, President Donald Trump let loose a series of tweets. Some emphasized that the wonderful response to the hurricane was going well, but another repeated the presidents assertion that Mexico would pay for a border wall, or as the tweet has it, THE WALL.

In their proposed homeland security budget, House Republicans in July allocated $1.6 billion to pay for construction of the border wall, a fraction of the $21.6 billion that the Department of Homeland Security estimates the wall would cost . Trump has since threatened a government shutdown if Democrats , who consider funding for the wall a non-starter, do not include money for the presidents pet project in government spending legislation. Meanwhile, Texas communities continue to grapple with the effects of a storm that has displaced tens of thousands of people.

Although Harvey could cause up to $40 billion in damage over several days, there are many ways that the government could use the proposed $1.6 billion set aside for the border wall to help respond to the disaster in Texas.

Flood Preparation

In his budget for 2018, President Trump proposed a cut of $600 million to the Federal Emergency Management Agencys state and local programs. That budget proposal also would eliminate funding for efforts to improve and redraw flood maps and cut about $90 million from the Pre-Disaster Mitigation Program, according to The New York Times. The $1.6 billion proposed for the border wall could provide this funding twice over.