Is the U.S. Ecosocial Safety Net Inequitable?: Evidence from Fema's Disaster Relief Program

Background and Purpose

Natural disasters (known as “natural hazards”) are projected to increase in frequency and intensity as human-induced effects on the climate remain largely unabated. The projected disproportionate impacts may exacerbate socioeconomic and racial/ethnic inequities already present in the U.S. and anticipate the increasing salience of the ecosocial policy landscape, a set of policies and programs that address the overlap of social and environmental concerns. Ecosocial safety nets, a class of ecosocial policy, aim to address the social risks associated with climate change and natural hazards through the redistribution of economic resources. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administers disaster relief programs to help communities prepare for and recover from natural hazards, including the Individual Assistance Program (IAP), which serves individuals and households after natural hazards. The Individuals and Households Program (IHP), the only program with available data within IAP, “provides financial and direct services to eligible individuals and households affected by a disaster, who have uninsured or underinsured necessary expenses and serious needs.” The services offered by IHP include rental assistance, temporary housing, medical assistance, and child-care assistance. While this federally funded and administered social program mimics the U.S. welfare state and constitutes an “ecosocial safety net,” the programs have received far less scrutiny from scholars and policymakers. An unanswered and essential question is whether there are distributional inequities in the U.S. ecosocial safety net along the lines of race, class, and gender that may further aggravate existing inequities. The current study seeks to lay the groundwork for a clearer understanding of IAP with a descriptive analysis of the associations between county-level macrostructural factors and IHP expenditures after a natural hazard.

Methods

This study will examine the associations of county-level macrostructural factors and expenditure per recipient for the IHP using mixed, longitudinal, multivariate linear regression models. The dependent variables will be county-level IHP expenditure per recipient adjusted for inflation, and the independent variables will include county-level proportions of racial/ethnic groups, gender, age, education, non-citizens, poverty, unemployment, and state Governor’s political affiliation. Covariates will include hazard type and property damage. The sample includes 6913 county-year observations between 2009 and 2021.

Results

Preliminary results, based on bivariate correlations, indicate that even when aggregating across all 1831 unique counties across all types of natural hazards, there is a statistically significant positive association between county-level white population and IHP expenditure per enrollee, and negative associations of Asian, Black, and Hispanic county populations and IHP expenditures. There is also a negative association between the proportion of non-citizen and women populations and IHP expenditures per recipient.

Conclusions

These preliminary results point to inequities in the federal response to natural hazards, along the lines of race, class, and gender, which may aggravate existing disparities in the U.S. Subsequent analyses will more rigorously model these associations to understand the extent of these inequities across time and space, laying the foundation for the first study of the U.S. ecosocial safety net and its social impact.