The leadership of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee sent a letter on May 13 to newly-confirmed FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell demanding answers to historically low approval rates for FEMA’s disaster recovery assistance programs. The bipartisan letter was signed by Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Ranking Member Sam Graves (R-MO), as well as Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management Chair Dina Titus (D-NV) and Ranking Member Daniel Webster (R-FL). The authors cited a recent Washington Post article that placed the current approval rate for FEMA’s Individuals and Households Program (IHP) – FEMA’s main program for providing assistance payments to individual disaster survivors – at 13% so far this year. The letter cited past legislation that directed FEMA to expand assistance to disaster survivors and called the current approval rate “troubling” and “counter to the Agency’s mission of ‘helping people before, during, and after disasters.’”
The letter also cited a 2020 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, which contained several recommendations to improve access to FEMA assistance that have yet to be acted upon. These recommendations included improving the language used in assistance determination and appeal letters and providing clear information to disaster survivors about how decisions regarding eligibility and award amounts are made. The letter reiterated the importance of clear communication, saying that “interacting with FEMA and its officials is one of the only personal interactions that many Americans have with the federal government, a lifeline that—depending on the frequency of disasters—hundreds of thousands depend upon each year during their moments of greatest need. Given FEMA’s role as the lead federal agency for coordinating disaster response and recovery, the agency’s communications and processes must be clearer and more accessible for survivors.”
Along with requesting a status update on the agency’s efforts to comply with the GAO recommendations, the letter requested other updates and documents from FEMA, including the documents provided to disaster survivors regarding the IHP program application process and eligibility determinations and scripts and other documents used by FEMA staff to conduct applicant intake. The letter requested that FEMA provide justification for the agency’s claim that it had received over 130,000 fraudulent registrations for disaster assistance in the last 18 months, whether the agency has used initial assistance denials to defer fraud, whether the agency is working to communicate the appeals process more clearly, and how the agency ensures that applicants with limited proficiency in technology are able to apply for its programs.
The concerns expressed in this letter echo those of NLIHC’s Disaster Housing Recovery Coalition (DHRC), a group of over 850 local, state, and national groups working to ensure that all disaster survivors receive the assistance they need to fully recover. The DHRC published its recommendations in a 2020 report coauthored with the Fair Share Housing Center of New Jersey entitled “Fixing America’s Broken Disaster Housing Recovery System” and will continue to push for greater equity and accessibility for FEMA’s programs.
Read the committee leadership’s letter at: https://bit.ly/2SV3VU9
Read the GAO report at: https://bit.ly/3tMOji9
Read the Fixing America’s Broken Disaster Housing Recovery System report at: https://bit.ly/3ojRyMF