House Speaker Mike Johnson slammed the Biden administration for the “massive failure” in its response to Hurricane Helene.

The Louisiana Republican’s remarks came Sunday as the response to the storm that ravaged multiple states more than a week ago has become a bigger political issue.

“At the federal level, this has been a massive failure. And you can just ask the people there on the ground. I have been there. I was in Georgia. I was in Florida, where Hurricane Helene made landfall, there on the coast. And then we’ll be going to the hardest hit parts of North Carolina on Wednesday of this week,” Mr. Johnson told Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday.”

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“When you talk to the people who are directly affected, they will tell you this has been an abject failure,” he said. “FEMA has lost sight of its core mission, I think, in so many cases, and the administration has not shown that they were prepared for this, this eventuality, and this terrible disaster.”

Mr. Johnson argued that there was “more than a week’s notice” of the hurricane’s arrival, and yet the disaster response wasn’t ready.

“Yet we still have people who have not been served and even rescued in North Carolina,” he said. “It is a heartbreaking, tragic and infuriating situation to have the federal government fail, as they have well.”

When asked whether he would bring Congress, which is on recess until after the Nov. 5 election, if needed, Mr. Johnson said lawmakers will be back “immediately after the election,” which he said would suffice for the kind of work that Congress can do.

“The thing about these hurricanes and disasters of this magnitude is that it takes a while to calculate the actual damages and the states are going to need some time to do that,” he said.

“You don’t just spend estimates to the federal government, you send specific needs and requests based on the actual damage,” he said, adding that Congress “will do its job.”

When asked about claims made by other Republicans who have said that FEMA money has been used to take care of immigrants, Mr. Johnson said the “streams of funding are different.”

FEMA has insisted these claims are false, saying the money to house migrants comes from a separate program funded by Congress.

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates reposted that clip of Mr. Johnson on Sunday.

Mr. Johnson “fact checks the lie that FEMA disaster funds - which there are more than enough of for the bipartisan mobilization in response to Helene - were somehow spent on migrants,” he wrote on X.

The White House has repeatedly hit back against criticism that it’s not handling the hurricane recovery well. Mr. Bates called the criticism “bald-face lies” in a memo Friday.

“President Biden and Vice President Harris are bringing Americans together and leading a whole-of-government response to Hurricane Helene,” Mr. Bates said. “But some Republican leaders and their partners in the right-wing media are using Hurricane Helene to lie and divide us.”

The Friday memo included praise for the federal government’s response from a host of Republican politicians, including Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee.

It cited Mr. McMaster’s comments at a recent news conference in which he called the federal response “superb” and said his state has received everything he has requested.

Since Helene made landfall, both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris — the two major-party presidential nominees — have visited North Carolina and Georgia, both of which are also key swing states in the tightly-contested race.

Mr. Trump was in North Carolina on Friday, and Ms. Harris was there the next day. The vice president praised local officials and residents for their response to the storm while visiting.

“I’ve been seeing and hearing the stories from here in North Carolina about strangers who are helping each other out, giving people assistance in every way that they need, including shelter, food, and friendship and fellowship,” she said.