Taibbi: FEMA Workers Improperly Collected Data About Politics Of Disaster Victims

Authored by Matt Taibbi via Racket News,

Last November 8th, on the Saturday after Election Day, one of the more bizarre post-scripts to Donald Trump’s re-election emerged in the form of a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) decision to sideline one official accused of telling FEMA workers to “avoid homes advertising Trump” while canvassing for victims of Hurricane Milton in Florida.

The Daily Wire spoke to multiple FEMA officials who produced screenshots of entries like “Trump sign, no contact per leadership”:

The most painful confirmation, however, came from then-FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, who testified after the election that the episode was an “isolated incident,” as well as “unacceptable” and “heartbreaking,” suggesting the problem was limited to one eventually-terminated Disaster Survivor Assistance crew leader named Marn’i Washington, adding: “I do not believe that this employee’s actions are indicative of any widespread cultural problems at FEMA.”

Washington didn’t take the CYA maneuver lying down. She made a series of aggressive media appearances, saying repeatedly “my orders come from my superior” from above when instructing subordinates to avoid homes that made some FEMA workers “uncomfortable” by featuring Trump paraphernalia:

Marn’i Washington, the ex-FEMA employee accused of telling her team not to go to Florida homes with Trump yard signs, says the order to avoid certain houses was from her direct superior based on previous team encounters.

More: https://t.co/2z6kdlrOLN pic.twitter.com/xxEqmiSG2E

— NewsNation (@NewsNation) November 19, 2024

The Democrats generally maintained that decisions to skip over houses featuring Trump signs or signs about guns were legit and safety-based. Republicans blasted FEMA workers for comparing Trump voters to “vicious dogs” and suggested instructions like “Per leadership no stop Trump flag,” and “Trump sign, no contact per leadership” were indicative of a wider problem.

A year later, the Privacy Office of the Department of Homeland Security is releasing a review of that episode, the broader issue of using disaster relief work to collect political intelligence on voters, and the potentially withholding of benefits from some with the wrong beliefs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the new administration found more than just one “isolated incident,” describing violations of the Privacy Act of 1974, which with a few exceptions bars collection of information about First Amendment-protected speech, like political signage. Most tellingly, though, DHS investigators found — in a near-exact parallel to trends in pro-censorship programs — that a lot of the political controversy surrounding FEMA aid grew out of the vague way in which the agency’s Disaster Survivor Assistance Field Operations Guide was written.

The Field Operations Guide instructed FEMA workers to “Remove yourself from the situation if you feel threatened” when dealing with “hostile” individuals, the only problem being, as the new report notes: “The Disaster Survivor Assistance Field Operations Guide does not define the term ‘hostile.’”

“The way the guide was written, FEMA employees had leeway to skip outreach to a house if its signs made them feel uncomfortable,” one Washington-based First Amendment lawyer put it last week. “So it’s basically the same concept of a harm or distress standard we’re seeing in Europe with speech issues, where the emotional response of the observer is what matters legally, as opposed to a concrete rule.”

The DHS report doesn’t describe a huge number of instances, but does list examples of FEMA workers from various relief efforts taking down political information well before the incident that actually made the news. FEMA’s actions were “not limited to the Hurricane Milton disaster relief efforts in 2024,” and in fact, “FEMA impermissibly collected prohibited information at least dating back to the Hurricane Ida disaster in September 2021.”

Some examples cited: October, 2021: “Homeowner had sign stated… this is Trump country.” September, 2021: “A lot of political flags, posters, etc. ‘Fuck Joe Biden,’ ‘MAGA 2024,’ ‘Joe Biden Sucks’ ‘Trump 2024’ We do not recommend anyone visiting this location.” November 2024: ‘There was a political flyer so I didn’t leave a FEMA brochure.” Neither Criswell nor Washington responded to requests for comment.

The DHS report lists several recommendations for changing procedures to make both political information-gathering and subjective aid delivery harder, but the problem the report identifies suggests a broader, hairier problem. Federal aid workers empowered to withhold relief based on what they consider “hostile” signage in either direction creates an opening for a federalized version of the old “walking-around-money” operation pioneered by ward-heelers in city elections, in which petty cash made it into the hands of one party’s potential voters. The number of incidents in the new DHS report don’t come close to suggesting an election-altering phenomenon (the most controversial instances came last year, but still totaled under 100 episodes), but as one official who worked on the report noted, the phenomenon still “really escalated in the last administration.”

The DC-based lawyer said the mere fact that FEMA aid can be politicized should worry members of both parties enough to do something about it. “People hate the government enough as it is. If it’s known that disaster relief can be politicized and nobody fixes the problem, imagine how mad people will be one or two cycles from now.”