The NLIHC-endorsed “Disaster Assistance Simplification Act” was passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate on July 28. The bill, which would create a uniform application for all federal disaster recovery programs, was passed out of the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs late last year. It will now head to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Under the bill, FEMA would manage the uniform application system, but other federal agencies would work together to update application questions and would share application data necessary to administer disaster assistance programs. Importantly, data from each program would continue to be governed by agency data sharing rules, creating the possibility that HUD could share bulk data from the Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) program with researchers via its data licensing system.
“The lowest-income and most marginalized disaster survivors are often hardest hit by disasters, and they continue to face the steepest, longest path to a complete and equitable recovery,” said NLIHC President and CEO Diane Yentel in a press release touting advocates’ support for the measure earlier this year. “For too long, a daunting application and appeals process has prevented low-income disaster survivors from accessing the critical assistance they need to get back on their feet. The creation of a universal application for disaster assistance, such as the one proposed in the Disaster Assistance Simplification Act, is an important first step in dismantling barriers created by the federal government and fixing our nation’s broken disaster housing recovery system.”
Read the text of the “Disaster Assistance Simplification Act” at: https://bit.ly/3pSmWHa