By The New York Post Editorial Board
It didn’t start with this year’s hurricanes: Team Biden’s weaponization of FEMA — discriminating against the “wrong” disaster victims — goes back years.
And it’s not all on lower-level bureaucrats: The orders came from the top.
Yes, FEMA axed Marn’i Washington in the face of damning evidence she told subordinates to skip outreach to homes with pro-Trump signs after Hurricane Milton, which led to at least 20 homes getting skipped in October and early November.
But Washington says she was just adhering to agency policy, and her supervisor OK’d her order: It was no “isolated” incident, as Biden’s FEMA folks claim.
An ex-FEMA official backs up that claim, telling The Post that bypassing Trump-backers has long been an open secret at the agency, as part of a larger policy of discrimination under Biden’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion directives.
That is, FEMA quietly prioritizes “the most under-resourced, marginalized communities first,” the source reports — which means walking right past evident disaster victims who don’t fit the bill.
Washington explains one way it works: “FEMA preaches avoidance first, and then de-escalation” to its on-the-ground staff: Avoid homeowners who look likely to be hostile.
Yet the policy she says higherups OK’d of shunning homes solely because they sport a pro-Trump sign amounts to blatant profiling — either a bigoted assumption that Trump backers are all dangerous, or a sideways excuse for intentional political discrimination.
No wonder Florida GOP Rep. Carlos Gimenez is livid: “The Biden administration weaponized FEMA to purposely deny Trump-supporting Americans critical aid and assistance during a natural disaster,” he told The Post.
It fits a pattern: The Biden Justice Department, recall, is famous for targeting political opponents, from parents at school-board meetings to Trump himself.
Biden’s Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Trade Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, National Labor Relations Board, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York and US Fish and Wildlife Service have all probed Elon Musk after he had the temerity of aligning himself with Trump and, worse, championing free speech.
And the larger DEI push (by Biden at the federal level, and everywhere else it’s been embraced) is nothing but rank discrimination in the name of “social justice.”
At FEMA and far beyond, Team Trump has a whole lot of house-cleaning to do.
Biden’s FEMA weaponization — far worse than even Trump suspected https://t.co/wuxRnifRe6 pic.twitter.com/mVpl01DG1A
— NY Post Opinion (@NYPostOpinion) November 12, 2024