NEW YORK, October 5. /TASS/. US residents have questions about the level of support to those affected by Hurricane Helene in comparison with funds spent for supporting Ukraine, Newsweek reported.

"Despite FEMA's [Federal Emergency Management Agency of the United States] ongoing efforts, several Americans took to social media to express that the aid for hurricane victims wasn't high enough when compared to the funding US has approved for Ukraine since <…> 2022," the magazine said.

According to the report, the US Congress allocated about $176 billion for US agencies to provide weapons and other support to Ukraine, while primary funding for domestic disaster relief programs amounted to roughly $20 billion each year.

On September 25, Category 4 Hurricane Helene made landfall in the sparsely populated Big Bend region in Florida. Shortly thereafter, it weakened to a Category 1 and then to a tropical storm.

On October 1, US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas announced that the recovery process from Hurricane Helene would take years and would be extremely expensive. On October 2, CNN reported that the death toll from Hurricane Helene had reached 162. Moody’s Analytics estimates damage from the disaster at around $34 billion.