FEMA Is Not Screwing Blue States

It is a red flag whenever any complex data is reduced to "red vs blue"

There is something really fun about data detective work.

Sometimes this work is done quickly. Someone will show a chart, point to the source data, and I’ll grab the data and it turns out that the the chart is just a simple graphical representation of the source data. For people who care about the truth, this is the ideal scenario but it is also boring. I want some really outrageous narrative driven by a chart but it’s hard to figure out where the data came from. That’s where the real fun is.

I got that this weekend in this chart, which came to my attention through Jeremiah Johnson. The chart tells the story of a vindictive, cartoonishly evil president who is making the victims of disasters suffer because they live in the wrong state.

This chart comes from a Politico article with the title “It’s 3 times harder for blue states to get disaster funding under Trump”. The key data point in this article is in the chart above.

The president has approved just 23 percent of blue state requests for disaster aid, compared to 89 percent for red states.

Charts like this very rarely come from nowhere. Most journalists at least still have enough integrity to not completely make up data. The nature of this particular accusation is extraordinary and extreme. Denying emergency relief to American citizens based on their politics would be an act of wanton cruelty. But that severity cuts both ways. To falsely accuse the Trump administration of such an act would be a cynical and cruel thing to do. If someone were to cherry-pick data or manipulate their data sets in order to cause their fellow citizens to believe a falsehood this severe would be the act of a sociopath.

So I went to go find out is this is really what the data said. In the process, I’ll go through how the data was manipulated in order to get to the chart above.

Finding the core data was pretty easy. FEMA hosts a comprehensive set of data on the OpenFEMA website. The two data sets that we care about are Declaration Denials and FEMA Web Disaster Declarations.

Let’s compare Trump’s second term to Joe Biden’s term in office. I’m doing this because that is a comparison already being made in the chart above but also because that trims our data set down so we can talk about it in a little more detail.

We’ll start with some raw stats from this data. During Joe Biden’s term, FEMA denied 56 aid requests and approved 512, a 9.9% rejection rate. So far during Trump’s second term, FEMA has denied 24 aid requests and approved 141, a 14.5% rejection rate.

If we’re trying to tell a “Red v Blue” partisan story, it’s going to matter a lot how we define Red and Blue. It’s pretty typical to use the presidential election results as a proxy for redness and blueness. But, then again, the chart says “Democrat-led” so maybe we should use the party of the state governor as our indicator.

Politico rejected both those definitions and decided that “[party]-led” means that a state has a governor and two senators from the same party.

This definition should raise eyebrows because it immediately kicks 10 states out of our data set (11 if we count Virginia when they had a Republican governor last year). North Carolina and Kentucky both have Democratic governors and Republican Senators and were both subject to recent natural disasters but they will not show up on this chart at all. It also means that, if the narrative of this chart is true, Trump is punishing two states that voted for him (Arizona and Michigan) because they are “Democrat-led”. That seems like an odd thing to do.

I want to show how this framing changes our results. Let’s look at Biden-era FEMA denial rate by party, but change our definition for “red” and “blue” to reflect the election results (which states voted for Biden in 2020), the party of the governor, and using the Politico “governor plus both senators” metric.

If we wanted to tell a story of a vindictive Biden administration that was punishing red states, we would use the “party of the governor” metric. This makes it look like the FEMA denials are almost three times higher for “red” states than for “blue” states.