FEMA’s DEI Crippled Hurricane Helene Response

“I don’t know that anybody could be fully prepared for the amount of flooding and landslides that they are experiencing right now,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell protested to CBS News.

The ravages of Hurricane Helene had left parts of Asheville, North Carolina underwater, but it wasn’t just the homes and roads that were underwater, but FEMA’s botched response..

Criswell, who had been appointed to head FEMA by the Biden-Harris administration as a reward for coordinating New York City’s horrendously botched response to the pandemic, posed in a starched FEMA blouse and gold necklace on a morning show even as private volunteers were once again having to step in because the Federal Emergency Management Agency had failed.

FEMA was unprepared for the flooding because under Criswell, a DEI hire whose resume included being “the first woman commissioner of New York City Emergency Management”, the agency had shifted from disaster management to DEI disasters.

Goal 1 of FEMA’s Strategic Plan was to “instill equity as a foundation of emergency management”. FEMA’s Objective 1.1 was also not disaster management, it’s to “cultivate a FEMA that prioritizes and harnesses a diverse workforce”. FEMA’s leadership was required to make its priority “integrating diversity, equity, and inclusion in delivering the agency’s mission.”

Leading the way in implementing FEMA’s new ideological disaster management was Vice President Kamala Harris who claimed that she had started one of the “first environmental justice units of any DA’s office” when she helped turn San Francisco into a crime zone, and claimed that it’s “communities of color that are most impacted by” weather and natural disasters.

Kamala then argued that “we have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity” so that minorities would be first in line for aid regardless of who has the greater need.

FEMA kicked off hurricane season in 2022 with a preparedness campaign contending that black people were more vulnerable to hurricanes because, according to FEMA Deputy Administrator Erik Hooks, “black communities are on the frontlines of climate change.”

Hooks, another Biden-Harris nominee, had been appointed deputy administrator despite only five years of experience in emergency management, in order to “infuse equity across our agency” described the campaign prioritizing black people for natural disasters as reaffirming “our commitment to equity”. But FEMA’s commitment to equity was getting people killed.

“Black and African American communities often suffer disproportionate impacts from disasters. This is something that we must work to change and that starts with how we prepare,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell argued.

A few weeks later, Hurricane Ian became the third most expensive weather disaster and claimed over 150 lives. Most of the dead were white senior citizens. Elderly people living near the coast were the ones actually most at risk. FEMA had sacrificed their lives for equity.

Instead of atoning for the lives lost, Administrator Criswell doubled down by signing an agreement with the NAACP, a Biden-Harris administration ally, and assured illegal aliens that they could apply for taxpayer-funded aid. FEMA directed millions to creating “equitable” fire departments and tried to make sure too many white people weren’t applying for disaster aid.

During the devastating fires in Hawaii last year, FEMA was busy running DEI training which falsely claimed white supremacy is “ingrained in nearly every system and institution in the U.S” as part of ‘Goal 1’ and its mandate to make “equity a foundation of emergency management.

The introduction to FEMA’s Building Alliances for Equitable Resilience by Chauncia Willis, a former wellness and diversity coach, urges disaster officials to reach out to “LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, Black Lives Matter chapters”.

The DEI bureaucracy at FEMA had fundamentally tainted its risk calculations. As Freedom Center Investigates revealed in a 2022 investigation, the agency’s National Risk Index had baked in a “social vulnerability” component based on the percentage of minority groups.

A town that is 40% black, 33% Hispanic and 12% Asian is calculated by FEMA as being more at risk than a town that is made up of 23% Italian-Americans, 44% Irish, 9% Jews and 18% Swedish-Americans. Two towns with the same risk level, but different racial numbers will put the minority town ahead of the non-minority one when it comes to aid to prepare for a disaster.

Asheville, North Carolina, which has an 84% white population and only 4.5% black population, was doomed to be considered lower risk than similar black or minority areas because of the systemically racist algorithms being employed by federal bureaucrats at FEMA.

Administrator Criswell told the media that FEMA couldn’t have been prepared for the historic flooding in North Carolina, but the area has a history of floods going back two centuries. The Great Flood of 1916 had killed 80 people and flooded the area with more rain than ever before. Had FEMA studied the history of floods, instead of the history of race, it might have been ready.

But the Biden-Harris administration had illegally mandated racial discrimination across every federal agency with its ‘equity’ executive orders.

The dead in North Carolina are just more of the victims of the systemic racism of equity.

FEMA’s failures in Hurricane Helene were not an accident. They were the inevitable outcome of prioritizing ideology over mission, quotas over merit, and race over need. A DEI leadership dedicated to enacting DEI has ineptly presided over another natural disaster. From East Palestine to Ashevillle, the Biden-Harris administration has allowed innocent people to suffer and die because the racist ideology of equity values some lives less depending on their race.

The foundation of disaster management can either be racial equity or disaster response.

FEMA Administrator Criswell, Deputy Administrator Hooks, and FEMA’s DEI bureaucracy have demonstrated that it cannot be both because there’s no room for DEI when people are dying.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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