FEMA Cares More About ‘Equity’ Than Americans In Disaster

What’s the point of a federal disaster agency if the chief priorities of said agency are not to save Americans from disaster?

In September last year, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell joined the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to sign the “Agreement to Advance Equity in Disaster Resilience.”

According to an NAACP press release, the group’s “Emergency Management Task Force … will meet regularly with FEMA leadership to advance progress on equity within disaster preparedness and resilience.”

“The signing comes on the heels of an Intergenerational Climate Resilience Roundtable recently hosted by NAACP and FEMA during NAACP’s Climate Week NYC activations,” the release read. “The roundtable focused on disaster preparedness, climate resilience and instilling equity in emergency management.”

FEMA’s website characterized the roundtable as a forum where “presenters shared their wealth of knowledge and information gleaned from their areas of expertise and personal experience regarding the intergenerational impacts of climate change and how disaster resilience can be improved.”

“At a time when we are experiencing some of the worst natural disasters, we need effective collaboration, communication and transparency of resources to help Black communities,” said the NAACP’s director for Environmental and Climate Justice.

FEMA held another roundtable earlier that year titled, “Helping LGBTQIA+ Survivors Before Disasters: Preparedness and Mitigation Considerations.”

“LGBTQIA people and people who have been disadvantaged already, are struggling. They already have their own things to deal with,” said Tyler Atkins, a FEMA emergency management specialist labeled with he/they pronouns who moderated the virtual panel. “So you add a disaster on top of that, it’s just compounding on itself.”

“I think that is maybe the ‘why’ of why we’re having these discussions, because it isn’t being talked about, it isn’t being socialized, we’re not paying attention to this community,” Atkins added.

Maggie Jarry of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) responded to Atkins with the revelation that “the shift we’re seeing right now is a shift in emergency services from utilitarian principles — where everything is designed for the greatest good for the greatest amount of people — to disaster equity.”

“But we have to do more,” Jarry stressed. “We have to look at policies and understand to what extend they have disadvantaged communities that have less assets, communities that have pre-existing vulnerabilities in accessing disaster-related recovery supports.”

Jarry went on to suggest incumbent strategies for disaster relief were crafted to exclude who they claim are marginalized groups.

“The topic at hand here is, are the policies that have been developed actually biased in either benign neglect or intentional erasure of the specific communities that are probably most in need of those services?” Jarry asked. “And does the aid then bias toward people with assets or other types of situations that weren’t part of the norm of this industry in the past.”

Atkins responded by rambling off a series of phrases popular in left-wing diversity programs.

“The topic of preparedness and preparedness resources and the intersectionalities within equities and discrimination and hate — it’s a real thing that needs to be discussed, needs to be vocalized,” Atkins said. “We need to start looking at how we can find solutions to this.”

In other words, the Biden-Harris administration put FEMA on track to become a socialist redistribution agency using disaster relief as a pretext to guide federal aid to preferred social classes based on the victim hierarchy of identity politics. Residents across the Appalachian South, meanwhile, were left abandoned by the federal government for weeks, while FEMA’s top three goals on the agency’s website include “equity” and “climate resilience” as the top two priorities. Saving Americans in the aftermath of major storms by keeping FEMA “ready” for a “prepared nation” comes in third.

In 1988, FEMA’s mission was expanded nearly 10 years after its creation to offer relief for Americans during federal emergency declarations based on events “of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the state and affected local governments.” Congress, however, has never given specific guidelines on what constitutes a “federal emergency,” allowing administrations to use the agency as a lever of political patronage.

Federalist Senior Editor Mark Hemingway profiled FEMA’s history for the Weekly Standard in 2012.

“Clinton ballooned the agency to the point where it had 10 times as many political appointees as comparable federal agencies,” Hemingway wrote, even appointing a former Arkansas state trooper to a top post. “By the end of his presidency, Clinton was declaring a federal disaster somewhere in the country every week on average. Naturally, this resulted in defining disaster relief down. Following a California earthquake in 1994, FEMA sent out 47,000 unsolicited checks — a total of $142 million — to homeowners for no other reason than they lived in supposedly affected ZIP codes.”

In 2021, the Biden-Harris administration recalibrated the goals of federal agencies upon coming into office to prioritize agendas defined by left-wing ideas of social justice. Former White House National Security Adviser Susan Rice was immediately appointed to lead the Domestic Policy Council where she was tasked with requiring agencies make “rooting out systemic racism” a focal point of their mission.

Now the federal disaster agency operating with goals to prioritize “equity” has been deployed to assist with the manmade disaster stemming from the open southern border. FEMA spent more than $1 billion “to provide humanitarian services to noncitizen migrants following their release from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)” under the “Shelter and Services Program” just within the last two years. The agency allocated nearly $364 million to the program in the fiscal year 2023 and $650 million for 2024.

“Over the last 4 years the Biden-Harris admin has steadily transformed FEMA — the agency responsible for responding to natural disasters like Hurricane Helene — into an illegal alien resettlement agency that emphasizes DEI over public safety,” America First Legal reported. The conservative legal group published a series on online posts outlining where FEMA spent tax dollars meant to assist Americans in the aftermath of major storms and hurricanes.

“The Shelter and Services Program is designed to exclusively provide shelter and services to illegal aliens,” AFL reported, with millions in grants spent to groups primarily across the Southwest. AFL also highlighted the “Emergency Food and Shelter Program” as a “separate program” that has given $685 million “to fund illegal aliens.”

FEMA’s multi-million-dollar grants for immigration support programs mark the natural culmination of a bloated federal agency being leveraged to achieve political goals well beyond its original intent. At some point, things might be better for both the American taxpayer and the victims of disaster to dismantle the agency that’s become yet another vehicle for identity politics and send federal disaster aid directly to the states.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at [email protected]. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.