The U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure’s Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management held a hearing, “FEMA Priorities for 2022: Stakeholder Perspectives,” on February 16. The hearing focused on reform priorities for FEMA in the coming year, including making assistance easier to access for disaster survivors, ensuring that FEMA’s workforce can meet the agency’s needs, and guaranteeing that city and state governments can receive timely reimbursements for disaster and mitigation activities. NLIHC submitted a statement for the record on behalf of the Disaster Housing Recovery Coalition (DHRC), an NLIHC-led group of more than 850 local, state, and national organizations working to ensure that all disaster survivors receive the assistance they need to fully recover.
Witnesses at the hearing represented the emergency management community and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and included Erica Bornemann, director of Vermont Emergency Management, who represented the National Emergency Management Association (NEMA); Carolyn Harshman, president of the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM); and Chris Currie, director of Homeland Security and Justice at the GAO. The witnesses representing NEMA and IAEM focused their comments on several FEMA grant programs that benefit state and local governments and emergency management agencies, although the written testimony submitted by NEMA also called for a streamlined application process for disaster survivors. Chris Currie pushed forcefully for reforms called for by the GAO in recent reports and explained that the GAO had “found that survivors face a number of challenges applying for and obtaining FEMA assistance [and that] confusion doesn’t just lead to frustration but to disaster survivors not pursuing assistance when they may have been eligible to get it.”
The questions asked by subcommittee members indicated a general interest in increasing access to FEMA programs. Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) asked witnesses about disparities in assistance received by Black communities compared to majority white communities. In response, Mr. Currie explained that his office had found that FEMA did not collect the data necessary to answer the question. In one of his questions, Representative Doug LaMalfa (R-CA) referred to the housing problems experienced by members of his district after the catastrophic Camp Fire in 2017, and Mr. Currie responded that FEMA’s suite of post-disaster housing solutions had not been designed with wildfires in mind. Representative Troy Carter (D-LA) asked what FEMA could do to immediately remove obstacles to assistance, a question the GAO itself had examined in its reports last year, according to Mr. Currie.
Watch a recording of the hearing at: https://bit.ly/3JBKPY1
Read the statement for the record submitted by NLIHC at: https://bit.ly/34NaFcI