Short but sweet: Congress passes the Disaster Assistance Deadlines Alignment Act
Incremental change is a blessing in an election year
After a federally declared disaster, individuals and households have a lot of challenges to deal with. One of the unfortunate ones is the sheer amount of information, paperwork, etc. that comes along with receiving disaster aid. FEMA recently took significant steps in reforming the Individual Assistance (IA) program authorized under section 408 of the Stafford Act, to make those programs more easily available and less burdensome for applicants. These changes, long hoped for in the disaster research and policy advocacy communities, will go into effect later this month.
And now, another bit of good news…anyone who has interviewed disaster survivors has heard confusion over deadlines, because many different programs collide and often have different applications, due dates, requirements etc. One particularly eggregious example is that the FEMA IA program has a different deadline than the FEMA unemployment assistance program that is authorized under a different part of the Stafford Act (Section 410). This has created tremendous stress in many survivors’ lives as they sometimes confuse deadlines for FEMA assistance and miss critical cut-off points for aid availability.
Enter the Disaster Assistance Deadlines Alignment Act, originally sponsored and by Senators Rand Paul, Gary Peters and Marco Rubio in the Senate. This short piece of legislation:
Amends Section 410 of the Stafford Act to align the deadlines for Section 408 (IA) and Section 410 (Unemployment) programs; and
Allows the acceptance of late submissions for unemployment submission, if the individual has “good cause” and is still within the assistance period.
The Senate passed the bill by unanimous consent in July of 2023, and yesterday the House followed suit. A small change, but sometime in the not-to-distant future our disaster programs will have gotten a little less confusing and a little more fair.