President Joe Biden is set to release $1.3 billion in federal funding designated to help the island commonwealth of Puerto Rico combat the impact of climate change, and the administration will loosen restrictions Donald Trump put on post-hurricane relief, the New York Times reports.

Trump signed an executive order on January 20th, hours before he left office, that significantly restricted the use of $4.9 billion in federal aid Congress had allocated after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017.  Biden will reverse the order.

The deliberately slow distribution of funds have hampered recovery efforts in Puerto Rico, where tens of thousands of people were still without housing according to a July 2020 report in the Washington Post. 

The impact of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico was an early black eye for the Trump Administration.  Trump and his third wife, Melania, traveled to the island to boast of the success of his administration in protecting lives.

“Every death is a horror,” Trump said during an October 3, 2017 trip to the devastated island, “but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and you look at the tremendous – hundreds and hundreds of people that died – and you look at what happened here with, really, a storm that was just totally overpowering … no one has ever seen anything like this.  What is your death count?” he asked as he turned to Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Rosselló. “17?”

During that trip, Trump infamously “shot” paper towels like basketballs into a group of hurricane survivors.

On Puerto Rico alone, the official number of Americans killed due to Hurricane Maaria was 2,975.  An estimated 1,836 people in the entire US died from Hurricane Katrina.