FEMA Mistake Threatens to Put Disaster Survivors Underwater Again

Posted on May 11, 2011

Flickr / JU5T1N Some rights reserved

A home wrecked by flooding in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 2008.

Thousands of Americans devastated by natural disasters in the last few years are being asked to return a total of more than $22 million in federal relief money accidentally given to them by FEMA. The organization is required by law to retrieve the funds, but many recipients are unable to pay.

This latest blunder is not good for the federal agency that single-handedly botched the response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans under the supervision of the Bush administration and then-director Michael D. Brown. It’s also fuel for the political fire into which congressional Republicans and conservative Democrats hope to toss Medicaid and other social welfare programs. —ARK

AP via Google:

The agency is asking Van Fleet and thousands of other Americans who were victims of natural disasters to return more than $22 million in government aid, acknowledging it mistakenly made payments to many people who were ineligible.

FEMA is required by law to recover improperly spent money, but most of the people who were helped say they used the cash years ago, and they don’t want to be financially punished because of the agency’s errors.

... Documents obtained by The Associated Press show that FEMA is seeking payments from more than 5,500 people who were affected by 129 separate disasters since 2005, including floods, tornados, hurricanes and other calamities from Arkansas to American Samoa. The agency is still reviewing records, and more repayment requests could go out soon, including to victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Read more

More Below the Ad

New and Improved Comments

We are launching a major overhaul of our comments section.

In addition to more robust spam filtering and moderation, new features include the ability to rate other comments, sort how they are displayed and respond directly via e-mail or in a thread.

Unfortunately, commenters will lose their existing Truthdig identities. It's a pain, we know, but on the plus side you will now be able to log in with a plethora of options, including Google, Twitter, Facebook and Disqus accounts.

Before launching this system we spent months in discussion with our top commenters. We listened to the feedback and we hope you like what we've come up with.

Please direct any problems or concerns to us via our contact page.