The NLIHC-led Disaster Housing Recovery Coalition (DHRC) joined 18 other national organizations in co-signing letter supporting passage of the “Disaster Assistance Simplification Act” (S. 1528), sponsored by U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs Chairman Gary Peters (D-MI), Ranking Member Rand Paul (R-KY), Senator James Lankford (R-OK), and Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC). Submitted to leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives on November 12, the letter requests speedy enactment of the bill, which was passed by the Senate earlier this year.
The bill, which was endorsed earlier this year by NLIHC and the DHRC, would create a uniform application system for disaster assistance. 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 in 2023. “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 letter supporting the Disaster Assistance Simplification Act here.