I keep seeing all sorts of stuff about FEMA being all sorts of things but isnt it just the US government being able to move in and help out?
In: Other
Misinformation and disinformation. It’s all political, *everything* these days is political.
Republicans claim to be the party of small government so ideologically they want to disable FEMA and similar agencies. (They also want to interfere in the most personal aspects of people’s lives)
Republicans are also seeing devastating weather conditions destroying ‘red’ states, so they are manufacturing outrage that FEMA isn’t doing enough – mostly by lying.
“I think you all know that I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” – Ronald Reagan
A segment of the US population is against Federal authority/power/tax/regulations of any kind. They claim to support small government – States, Counties, cities. They are known as States Rights.
Russian anti-democracy bot network and grifter right winger American Nazis.
That’s the answer.
My wife formerly worked for them and I’ve also been around a few disasters when they were helping out. The complaint is usually that they aren’t helping fast enough or providing enough help. There’s plenty of paperwork to fill out and documentation you have to provide in order to receive help, and there’s also a lot of government review to ensure compliance with environmental regulations and other laws (e.g., historic preservation) that apply to any project the federal government is funding.
Some complaints are valid, some aren’t, but it all boils down to “not enough help and not fast enough.”
It’s the classis right wing dicotomy of ‘big government’ overreach whilst also wanting to govern the most intimate aspects of people’s lives.
During the Obama administration, one right-wing conspiracy that was floated around was that FEMA was being used a front for concentration camps which would be the first step in eliminating white people from the US. After Donald took office, the sentiment stuck around that “FEMA BAD!” and it’s become a hard-right talking point ever since.
It’s consistent with recent upticks in not trusting government agencies, primarily due to the spread of misinformation. In this case, bad actors said FEMA workers told residents the agency planned to take possession of private property/land damaged by the storm. They also claimed that FEMA ran out of funds, denied financial aid to damage victims, or prevented citizen volunteers from providing aid to stranded survivors. All the claims have a tiny little bit of truth which partisan hacks use to rile up low-information viewers who live in their information bubbles. In reality, emergency response and post-disaster mitigation work require small “cities” to be erected and fully operational within a day in an area ravaged by disaster to provide numerous types of relief services such as distributing food and essentials, organizing and deploying workers and volunteers, assess the damages to determine priorities, and erect the field operation areas for the deployed staff, among countless smaller tasks. A single video taken 12 hours after the storm showing damage not being addressed by FEMA gets spun into “Biden’s response too slow to help victims because resources currently busy giving transgender surgery to illegals who eat your cats!”
Republicans want any reason to bash Biden and, by extension, Kamala Harris, so they manufacture outrage over FEMA not doing enough to help hurricane victims. They don’t care if FEMA is actually failing or succeeding, or if the areas it might be falling short are due to funding cuts they themselves insisted on, they’re just going to twist anything into attacking Democrats any way they can.
The thing is FEMA has workers who humans as well. They can’t just move in when the condition could pose critical danger to the lives of FEMA workers or of local authorities. The unrealistic expectation of these people is that FEMA be stationed in anticipation to the disaster right in the middle of the disaster zone.
Other than that, personal property damages are a matter of insurance coverage, not FEMA’s responsibility. Some politicians would use rhetorics like “their house is gone and you’ve given them $750?”. The thing is, right after a big disaster, nobody wants money, because it’s not like they could use that money to summon a boat from thin air and go to a flooded/destroyed/closed store nearby to buy stuff.
Latest Answers