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The changes to survivor signup have been made inside the program that the agency uses to manage disaster aid applications and pay out survivors, known as the National Emergency Management Information System (NEMIS). Current and former FEMA employees told WIRED that, while they have major concerns about requiring an email address to register for aid, they do believe the system is in need of a technical overhaul. (“It is absolutely an outdated system that crashes daily,” one former FEMA worker who worked with NEMIS told WIRED.)
Agency officials have also publicly expressed the need to modernize the way disaster aid reaches survivors. Former acting director Cameron Hamilton described some of the agency’s goals during a testimony in front of the House Oversight Committee in May.
“The idea [is] that when you order a pizza from Domino’s, you know when it was ordered, when it goes into the oven, when it comes out of the oven, when it’s ready for pick up and sliced and in a box. Yet we don’t have the same level of approach towards guiding and mentoring through the process of applying for public assistance or individual assistance,” he said. “We have individual survivors who wait weeks to get responses, sometimes months before they get payouts, who are in significant financial dire straits.” (Hamilton was fired from the agency a day after this testimony.) Twelve days after Hamilton’s testimony, the new acting administrator of the agency, David Richardson, met with members of DOGE to discuss a new Disaster Information Portal system, according to calendar information seen by WIRED.
According to the update document, FEMA introduced a new “Status Tracker” in June to a survivor portal on a federal disaster assistance website, which includes guidance on what types of documents are needed to meet verification requirements as well as a “visual representation of progress through the FEMA process.”
Despite agreeing that the agency’s technical systems need an update, current and former FEMA employees told WIRED they worry that excluding people without email addresses wholesale from the application process could leave out those who may need the most help. Exclusively providing information and payment through an online portal, meanwhile, could be confusing even to people with emails—especially, a FEMA worker says, to seniors.
“Email is already a MAJOR barrier for a lot of survivors, especially the elderly,” they say. “They must use the email to create a profile on disasterassistance.gov, and this is where their correspondence is. They receive an email informing them they have a new letter, but the actual letter is within their online profile. They have to do all these verifications to access it, and it’s too much for a lot of people. A lot need postal, and email is a terrible option for them even if they have an email address and know how to read their emails.”
The changes come amid a wider push from the agency to shift aid following disasters from the federal government to the state. As WIRED reported in May, the agency has phased out door-to-door surveying of survivors this summer. FEMA workers worry what even more obstacles to aid could mean for those in need.
“Ending door-to-door canvassing and requiring email to register are certainly trends in a disturbing pattern of changes by the Trump administration that abandon the most vulnerable members of communities after a disaster,” a FEMA employee tells WIRED.
