Disaster-Related Administrative Burden and Perceptions of Recovery and Equity

• In Event: Public Perceptions of Bureaucratic Programs and Agencies

Abstract

Research on how exclusion from federal recovery assistance impacts perceptions of recovery efforts/investment may improve equitable disaster recovery. This essay identified whether encountered delays and denials in federal recovery services translated to perceptions of inequitable recovery trajectories for applicants and the wider community. I used the Kaiser Family Foundation/Episcopal Health Foundation Harvey Anniversary Survey to assess whether an individual’s federal assistance approval status impacted their recovery perceptions ten to eleven months after Hurricane Harvey impacted Texas. I measured burden as having pending or denied federal assistance applications at the time of the survey. The reference group was survey respondents with approved FEMA or SBA applications. I assessed recovery along four dimensions (disruption, home, financial, and overall quality of life). I assessed fairness perceptions as confidence measures that money spent helped those most in need. Equity perceptions were measured along class lines (poor, middle, wealthy), race/ethnicity (African American, White, Latinx), and immigrant status. I also assessed how experiencing burden influenced perceptions of self-identification (i.e., rebuilding efforts helped "people like me"). I used multivariate ordinal logistic regression, adjusting for socioeconomic and disaster damage factors.

Survey respondents who applied for federal assistance and received delays or denials in recovery services had no differences in recovery perceptions than those who received federal approvals. However, experiencing administrative burden did play an outsized role in wider equity and fairness perceptions. Individuals with pending or denied federal assistance were 68.4% less likely to be confident that rebuilding money spent were helping those most in need, holding various factors such as recovery level, disaster damage, poverty, and race/ethnicity constant. Respondents who experienced delays and denials were also 79.2% less likely to be very confident that recovery investments helped the poor, and 98.6% less likely to be very confident that such investments helped the middle class, holding the same factors constant. Experiencing burden also resulted in respondents being 78.3% less likely to be very confident that recovery investments helped people like themselves.

Individuals rely on government to assist in disaster-impacted rebuilding efforts. If administrative burdens promote isolation and alienation from the wider society, community recovery and resiliency are threatened. As the US faces its greatest rebuilding effort in history with COVID-19 and political upheavals, how the government administers public services to spur on recovery may have broader implications on the shaping and re-shaping of our social contracts.

Author

• Natasha Malmin, Georgia State University