The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has a patchy history. Well known for denying assistance to low-income communities, FEMA appears to be cleaning up its act with a new plan to track who is applying for FEMA aid and, more importantly, who is being turned down.
Nearly half of all FEMA aid applicants since 2002 have been turned down, but the agency offers few insights into why applicants are rejected. In a bid to promote more equity within aid allocations, the agency has requested authority from the Office of Management and Budget to begin asking applicants for demographic information in aid applications, allowing the agency to track potential discrimination.
The demographic details will not be used to determine if an individual is eligible for disaster aid, but rather used after the fact to track whether the agency was disproportionately denying aid to individuals on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, tribal membership, marital status, or education level.
Advocacy groups have used broad data to find patterns of discrimination in FEMA aid distribution. In addition to potential discrimination, nonprofit political organizing group Black to the Future Action Fund points out that 46 percent of Black respondents experienced severe weather events this summer, compared to 32 percent of all Americans. This new FEMA policy also raises questions of whether aid distribution is in line with enhanced disaster risk.
Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told Grist, “Black and brown communities are often located in areas at higher risk of disaster and have the less resilient infrastructure to protect residents from harm. Long-term recovery resources tend to go to white communities that face lower risks.”
FEMA’s most commonly cited reasons for denying aid are the inability to prove residency and pre-existing damage not due to the disaster. Both of these categories also disproportionately apply to low-income and marginalized applicants.
Unfortunately, being denied from FEMA aid further exacerbates these conditions which make marginalized communities less likely to receive aid in the first place. FEMA’s decision to more closely track aid rejection and identify patterns of discrimination is a viable first step to rooting out inequality in this public agency.
