After a major weather disaster — like this weekend’s tornadoes that decimated parts of Kentucky, Missouri, and Virginia, killing at least 25 — the Federal Emergency Management Agency usually sends people door-to-door in affected communities. These FEMA workers are tasked with making sure residents are aware of the various aid and relief programs available to them.
That canvassing program is now being ended by the Trump Administration, however, with residents who may have both the greatest difficulty accessing aid and the greatest need likely to lose the most — including many Black people.
According to an internal agency memo obtained by Wired, “FEMA will discontinue unaccompanied FEMA door-to-door canvassing to focus survivor outreach and assistance registration capabilities in more targeted venues, improving access to those in need, and increasing collaboration with partners and nonprofit service providers.”
The change follows both federal budget cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency and controversy over FEMA’s post-Hurricane Milton response in Florida. After confrontations between canvassers and residents at homes displaying Trump flags and signs, officials advised workers to avoid such properties — a move some mischaracterized as some sort of reverse-racism, though it stemmed from documented safety concerns.
Who Loses Most?
Cutting the door-to-door program will “severely hamper our ability to reach vulnerable people,” an anonymous FEMA employee told Wired. Canvassing, they said, “has usually focused on the most impacted and the most vulnerable communities where there may be people who are elderly or with disabilities or lack of transportation and are unable to reach Disaster Recovery Centers.”
In the Southeast, many of those residents, particularly the ones who might not have good transportation options, may very likely be Black too. Even in the parts of the country where hurricanes are part of the fabric of life, Black people are nearly twice as likely to experience such a storm than the average resident.
It’s not as if knocking on doors was helping to make FEMA all that equitable, however. As a New York Times story from 2021 read, “A growing body of research shows that FEMA…often helps white disaster victims more than people of color, even when the amount of damage is the same.” Those studies, which relied on federal data, found that the agency paid more in relief funds to both individual white residents and to white communities too than it did to Black residents and communities.
The Biden Administration had been working to make changes to FEMA in order to improve equity. That effort included measures like expanding immediate direct cash payments to people in affected areas, which can help poorer residents, who are more likely to be Black or Latinx, to tend to their immediate needs in a disaster.
That kind of very basic effort — giving people what they need when they need it — can make a huge difference in the wake of a hurricane or other extreme weather event. Even more so if someone comes up to your door to say, hey, we can get you some cash to help. But that’s now a thing of the past.
