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By JD Vance

During times of crisis and war, presidential leadership is critical to cut through competing bureaucratic fiefs and protect Americans from death and devastation. The Biden-Harris response to Hurricane Helene, the deadliest storm since Katrina, has the people of the Southeast and especially Appalachia paying an extraordinary price for the administration’s incompetence.

Shortly after Helene made landfall in the U.S. on Sept. 26, Joe Biden was at his house in Rehoboth Beach, Del. Vice President Kamala Harris was flying between ritzy California fundraisers, hobnobbing with celebrities. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was in Los Angeles, presiding over an awards ceremony. Before the storm, Ms. Harris had blown off her disaster-response briefings, which were a staple of the Trump administration’s disaster-response planning. The lack of prioritization had real-world ramifications.

While Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden flouted their duties, a bureaucratic bottleneck was delaying the deployment of active-duty military personnel to the western mountains of North Carolina. On Oct. 2, six days after the storm made landfall, the Defense Department announced that 1,000 troops had been authorized to deploy to the hurricane-response zone, including elements of the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Liberty, N.C. These troops bring with them debris-clearing and water-purification equipment—critical resources for communities with blocked roads and orders to boildrinking water. As evening fell on Friday, Oct. 4, fewer than half of the 1,000 troops were conducting operations and deployed to Western North Carolina.

Deployment delays became severe enough that North Carolina Sens. Ted Buddand Thom Tillis issued a joint statement on Oct. 4 calling for “an active-duty military leader who has extensive experience with operations of this magnitude to lead moving forward.” The statement seemed to have an effect: The rest of the active-duty forces were deployed by the evening of Oct. 6, and the Pentagon authorized an additional 500, including advanced command-and-control resources.

In disaster response, every second counts. A week went by while the citizens of North Carolina suffered without the equipment and soldiers needed to save lives and begin recovery. This is the sort of bureaucratic hiccup that engaged political leaders solve. A competent leader would have ordered those men and women into motion earlier, bureaucracy be damned. Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden treated the situation like a public-relations disaster instead of a real one.

Full op-ed over at The Wall Street Journal: