The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in May 2023 launched a $12 million grant program designed to increase “equity” in disaster responses by making greater investments in communities with high concentrations of racial and sexual minorities, documents show.
FEMA’s 2023 Regional Catastrophic Preparedness Grant Program sought to disburse multi-million dollar grants designed to bolster disaster preparedness “equity” for what it called “underserved communities,” a label later defined in grant documents as “populations sharing a particular characteristic, as well as geographic communities, who have been systematically denied a full opportunity to participate in aspects of economic, social and civic life.” Examples of these groups cited in the FEMA documents include African Americans, Hispanics, Middle Easterners, LGBT people and people living in rural areas, among others.
“LGBTQIA people, and people who have been disadvantaged, already are struggling,” FEMA emergency management specialist Tyler Atkins said in a leaked Zoom recording that surfaced on Sunday. “They already have their own things to deal with. So, you add a disaster on top of that, it’s just compounding on itself.”
Maggie Jarry, an emergency management specialist at the Department of Health and Human Services, responded to Atkins by stressing that emergency management is moving away from providing “the greatest good to the greatest amount of people” and working towards “disaster equity.”
Black and gay people disproportionately live in areas where the effects of climate change, alongside poor infrastructure and a lack of resources, make natural disasters more dangerous, according to the FEMA documents. The agency used this position to argue that investments in these communities are needed to “effectively address equity in emergency management.”
FEMA instructed entities applying for grant funding under the program to use the Biden-Harris administration’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST) to identify disadvantaged communities where they would spend their federal grant dollars.
CEJST provides users with a map of every county the federal government considers “underserved” for the purposes of federal grantmaking. Many of the counties hit hardest by Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina and northern Georgia were made ineligible for funding through this program as a result of CEJST’s designations.
Hurricane Helene had left 227 people dead as of Saturday and damages caused by the storm could reach as high as $35 billion, according to estimates from the reinsurance company Gallagher Re. North Carolinians have received $27 million in individual assistance approved by FEMA, The Associated Press reported.
Entities that requested FEMA grant funding had their applications evaluated based on whether or not they selected communities labeled as “underserved” by CEJST as well as the degree to which they centered equity in their proposal.
“To advance considerations of equity in awarding RCPGP grant funding, FEMA will add additional points to the scores of projects that will benefit disadvantaged communities,” the grant document reads.
“We are expecting another hurricane hitting,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on Wednesday “FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season.”
FEMA’s shortfall in funding comes after the agency spent nearly $1 billion on migrant assistance programs in the 2023 and 2024 fiscal years.
Hurricane Milton is a Category 5 storm on track to hit the Florida Gulf Coast on Wednesday, CNN reported. Florida is still recovering from Helene.
FEMA did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
