After politicizing disaster aid, Team Trump starts keeping relevant data under wraps

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has quietly stopped publishing the list of pending disaster-aid requests that had been part of its daily operations briefing since at least 2012, Politico reports. That list had helped document a pattern in which President Donald Trump favored Republican-led states when approving federal relief. Removal came just after Politico ran a story on Trump pushing through money for Florida before the midterms while requests from other states sat waiting longer. Trump himself said publicly that Florida did not need the funds, yet he signed off and sped them along, according to MS NOW.

MS NOW columnist Steve Benen notes that earlier analyses had already pointed to partisan skew. The Associated Press covered an analysis in July showing Democratic-led states were denied disproportionately, and a March Politico account, drawing on administration figures, said rejections of Democratic-run states had reached the highest rate in FEMA's history.

Kenny Stancil, deputy research director at the Revolving Door Project, which tracks the administration's disaster-aid decisions, called the move part of a wider "war on data." He warned that hiding the requests could make it easier to treat disaster victims unequally depending on their state. Benen suggests that is likely the purpose.

Summarized by PolitiKool from MS NOW’s reporting. Read the full story at MS NOW →