The Biden-Harris office didn’t do enough to help recover from Hurricane Helene, leaving some badly damaged towns to fix their own problems.
Some people have said that FEMA may not have been able to handle this terrible disaster well because of political issues. On the FEMA website, it says that the agency’s main strategy goal is to “instill equity as a foundation of disaster management.” This could mean that ideology is more important than practicality.
On Sunday, the End Wokeness account on X shared a video from a March 2023 meeting about crisis preparation. The video showed that ideology has affected FEMA’s main priorities.
The first thing Tyler Atkins, a manager at the Office of Resilience’s “Resilient & Ready Seminar Series” who calls himself “they,” says at the beginning of the popular video is that “LGBTQIA people who have already been disadvantaged are suffering. To add another disaster to what they already have to deal with is like adding salt to the wound.”
“And I think that could be the ‘why’ of why we’re having these talks,” Atkins said, referring to the larger topic of non-straights’ concerns.
“There are a couple of things that are coming together in my mind here,” said Maggie Jarry, a senior disaster management expert at the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services. “One is the mindset of disaster management as a business and as an organization in the US.”
Jarry said, “What we are seeing now is a change in emergency management from utilitarian goals—where everything is meant for the greatest assistance, for the greatest number of people—to disaster equity.”
The Biden-Harris administration, especially President Joe Biden’s DEI executive order on June 25, 2021, seems to have led the federal government to shift its focus from helping the most Americans to helping certain types of Americans who are already getting a lot of help.
FEMA says the following:
“Unserved areas and certain identity groups often suffer more than others during tragedies. Because of this, disasters make problems that are already present in society even worse. These towns already have a lot of problems, and this circle makes them more likely to have disasters happen again. The emergency management people can work to break this cycle and make the country more resilient by making equality a core value of disaster management and meeting the specific needs of neglected areas.”
According to the agency, “identifying groups who have historically been ignored or overly affected by disasters and proactive promoting actions that advance equality for communities is important for their resilience.”