Trump’s Definition of DEI Is a Disaster for Disaster Management

Last year, there were 27 weather and climate disasters that reached the $1 billion in damages mark, outpaced only by the record-setting 28 in 2023.  Presiding over America’s response to this cataclysmic situation, we have a president ignoring the science on climate change, rolling back environmental protections, and denying half of the requests the federal government receives from states for major disaster aid. From weakening the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to laying off hundreds of federal employees critical in forecasting and responding to extreme weather events, this administration has already shown itself to be disastrous for disaster management.

But the unequal consequences of natural catastrophes reveal an added danger that Trump’s wide-ranging rollbacks create. When wildfires ravaged Los Angeles at the beginning of this year, killing at least 30 people, forcing around 200,000 evacuations, and destroying more than 16,000 structures, then-Trump advisor Elon Musk placed the blame squarely on L.A. agencies’ prioritization of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“DEI means people DIE,” he wrote on X, reposting a tweet from a conspiracist influencer claiming that L.A.’s fire chief and city budget both put DEI before brush clearing and ensuring that fire hydrants were water-stocked. Neither claim was true, and so in response, TIME ran a piece headlined “The L.A. Fires Have Nothing to Do With DEI.” 

Today, however, that isn’t exactly right either. DEI primarily refers to a set of principles designed to ensure representation in companies, institutions, or organizations. But if we accept the Trump administration’s operational definition of the acronym, the L.A. fires—and every other natural disaster—most definitely have something to do with DEI. Since January, the administration has cast DEI to mean any consideration of populations uniquely at risk, turning efforts to identify and address where needs are greatest into “dangerous preferential hierarchy.” In response, government agencies have been limiting the use of language like “at risk,” “historically,” “marginalized,” “underserved,” and hundreds of other terms, according to a New York Times analysis. 

And in so doing, they dodge the fact that the United States government has “marginalized” and “underserved” groups of individuals, many of whom are now disproportionately “at risk” for natural disasters. Indisputably inequitable aspects of American history—like segregation and redlining—have often determined who lives where, pushing communities of color into more hazardous zones. Present inequalities shape community readiness, as less wealthy areas are less likely to have resilient infrastructure and resources to prepare themselves. And individual circumstances determine how each of us experiences natural catastrophes, meaning disasters often hit the poor, the elderly, and people with disabilities hardest. 

Twenty years ago this week, Hurricane Katrina showed the world what it looks like when unequal realities on the ground are not considered in emergency planning, and patterns of inequality can be traced through every natural catastrophe since. Sticking with the L.A. example, a third of the 17 people living killed by the Eaton fire had impairments that could affect mobility and the median age of those killed was 77, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis. And, following the findings of a National Bureau of Economic Research study, on-average-wealthier Pacific Palisades residents were more likely to have solid insurance coverage than on-average-poorer homeowners in Altadena to the east.

“Much like we see social determinants of health, we also see social determinants of disasters,” Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia Climate School, told me.

Trump has turned strategizing to protect those most at risk—whether it be for maternal mortality, fire, or flood—into a politically perilous and deeply underfunded activity. He’s ended the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program (established during his first term) and frozen funding for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—both of which put federal money (over $18 billion so far) toward upgrading jurisdictions’ infrastructure to withstand climate-driven disasters, and both of which prioritized aid to, or shared more of the cost burden for, “low-income” and “disadvantaged” communities. 

But, as disasters have taught us time and time again, prioritizing aid to those most vulnerable  isn’t “woke” politics gone amok—it’s smart planning that saves taxpayers money.

The morning before Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, Mayor Ray Nagin issued the city’s first ever mandatory evacuation order. Around 1 million people from the greater New Orleans area heeded the order, but tens of thousands stayed. At the time, the city estimated that 100,000 residents did not own a car and one in four residents was living below the poverty line. Many were too old, in too poor of health, or simply too poor to evacuate without assistance. 

The responsibility to mobilize transport for those without in the case of emergencies lay with Louisiana’s Department of Transportation, headed at the time by former oil and gas man Johnny Bradberry. That task was “starkly left undone,” former Senator Joseph Lieberman said in a committee hearing on the failed evacuation. Bradberry himself admitted to senate investigators that his office did not support evacuation for “at-risk populations” because they had “put no plans in place” to do so.

The official death toll puts Katrina fatalities at 1,400 (revised from around 1,800 after a 2023 analysis of medical logs). Seventy-one percent of Louisianians who died were over 60, and 47 percent were over 75. Black New Orleanians, less of whom had personal vehicles when the storm struck, also made up a disproportionate share of the victims. 

Images broadcast around the world in the weeks that followed showed mostly Black families waving white flags from rooftops, Black bodies floating in floodwaters, and Black Americans waiting days in over 90 degree heat at the Superdome and outside the convention center for food, water, and medical attention.

“If this had been a much more affluent place, a place that was not as populated by African Americans, I am firmly convinced that it would have been a different kind of response,” Nagin told the BBC years later. Kanye West—not yet a self-identified Nazi at the time—put it more bluntly, famously going off-script on an NBC telethon to say, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.”

While Katrina undoubtedly crossed class lines, with fatalities dispersed through poor, middle-income, and wealthy neighborhoods, the years-long fallout exemplified how those struggling the most often get the least from government recovery programs. The formula Louisiana used to calculate payouts to homeowners under the Road Home, its program to help with rebuilding costs, based each grant on home values prior to the storm—meaning that people living in areas with a median income of $15,000 or under received on average $18,000 less than homeowners in areas where the median was over $75,000, according to an analysis by ProPublica as well as New Orleans’s own Advocate and WWL-TV. Needless to say, as poverty runs on racial lines in Louisiana (and the U.S. more broadly), homeowners in predominantly Black neighborhoods got less money to rebuild.

The failure of all levels of government during Katrina sparked an overhaul of the way America plans for and responds to disasters. The Post-Katrina Emergency Reform Act of 2006 increased the attention given to individuals with disabilities or other special needs in disaster preparedness and response, required the inclusion of people with disabilities in planning and preparedness activities, and called for regulations prohibiting discrimination in disaster assistance.

“Emergency planning that does not make provisions for society’s most vulnerable—the aged, the sick, the poor—is not just operationally unacceptable,” Senator Lieberman said in the evacuation hearing, “it is morally unacceptable.”

Emergency management professionals conceptualize their work in stages: preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. Trump’s penalization of policies and programs that consider who (or where) is most vulnerable has already cost communities in every stage. In the early months of his second term, the administration removed web tools that tracked climate impacts on low-income communities and showed where transport and water infrastructure is weak. 

Joshua Saks, the Adaptation Program director at the Georgetown Climate Center, described the move as “turning off the indicator lights” on the government’s dashboard in ways that will undoubtedly hit poor communities hardest. “You’re taking away specific tools or policy mechanisms that are designed to make sure that everyone at high risk gets helped,” he said. 

Since Trump reentered office, FEMA has also stopped offering trainings on how to incorporate the needs of vulnerable groups in preparedness; specifically, two titled “Including People With Disabilities in Disaster Operations” and “Integrating Access & Functional Needs into Emergency Planning,” an official in the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES) told me.

FEMA declined to comment on when or why the agency stopped offering the trainings. In response, CalOES has made some of its own training sessions available to emergency managers nationwide at no cost. 

And, in ending the BRIC grant program and freezing Infrastructure Law funds, Trump undercut communities’ abilities to take on large-scale mitigation projects—undoubtedly the most cost-effective interventions. Studies have found that taxpayers save between $6 and $13 per every $1 spent on mitigation, and that return on investment is only expected to grow as storms increase in frequency and severity. Case in point, against Katrina’s $125 billion in damages, rebuilding New Orleans’s levees to withstand similar storms cost a meager $15 billion.

In rescinding Biden-era memos on the Infrastructure Law, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy described the legislation’s prioritization of resources to communities most in-need as injecting “a social justice and environmental agenda into decisions for critical infrastructure projects,” and in its press release announcing the termination of the BRIC program, FEMA called the program “politicized.”

In reality, these programs supported critical projects across jurisdictions both red and blue in the exact ways experts say we need: They funded long-term, large-scale investments like flood control systems, stormwater management upgrades, and resilient coastal infrastructure. Individual preparedness measures—like fortifying homes or ensuring one’s insurance is up to snuff—may be available to the wealthier among us, but when disasters take roads, bridges, schools, or hospitals out of commission, even those who battened down their own hatches will be in dire straits. 

Programs that support whole community preparedness may be harder and more complicated than individual preparedness measures, but they’re also more holistic: They serve entire populations rather than the few who can afford to be ready. And in the end, those investments are, by every estimate, far, far cheaper than recovering from disasters governments fail to mitigate for.

Under Trump, the federal government’s list of no-go language is expansive. “Vulnerable populations”—which, in the context of disasters, can mean older adults, those with physical or intellectual disabilities, people with chronic conditions, people with limited English proficiency, those dependent on public transit, homeless people, rural residents, or children—is another forbidden term, alongside words like “accessible,” “disabilities,” and “discrimination.” 

But eliminating snippets of “liberal” rhetoric doesn’t eliminate the populations they refer to or the needs they have—just the programs and funding intended to meet those needs. Wiping away the concept of “accessibility” won’t decrease the number of people who use wheelchairs and need “accessible” transportation to evacuate. Avoiding the words “discrimination,” “segregation,” or “racism” won’t change the reality that—due in large part to discrimination, segregation, and racism—Black communities are disproportionately at risk for extreme heat, severe flooding, and hurricanes. And nixing “Indigenous communities” from government usage won’t alter the fact that legacies of forced relocation have left many Indigenous communities in fire-prone rural and remote regions, making Native Americans six times more likely to live in an area with “extreme fire potential” than white people. 

The prioritization of disaster management resources need not focus on race—especially as, given the above, directing resources to those communities most at risk would inherently benefit communities of color—but the federal level has a responsibility to ensure that factors of race don’t deprive communities. Because while disasters don’t discriminate, governments in America certainly have. 

When severe storms and flooding led to a failure of Jackson, Mississippi’s water system in August of 2022, leaving over 150,000 people without safe drinking water for months, sources from the New England Journal of Medicine to Human Rights Watch laid blame on decades of disinvestment in a city whose population is more than 80 percent Black. A 2024 Environmental Protection Agency evaluation subsequently found that the Mississippi State Department of Health “did not consistently enforce the Safe Drinking Water Act or provide adequate oversight for the Jackson public water system.”

Historically, from the Emancipation Proclamation to the Civil Rights Act and beyond, the federal government has stepped in to deliver justice for populations experiencing discrimination on state or local levels. In decimating the federal government, Trump has used its power to do the opposite.

It’s true that not all workplace DEI programs have been effective, and the left’s embrace of DEI has been divisive. Yet neither fact erases the need to plan for at-risk populations, the responsibility to ensure discrimination doesn’t rear its head along the way, or the importance of striving for a more equal society overall. We all know someone who is disproportionately vulnerable to disasters, whether they be a rural resident, an elderly parent, a friend with young children, or a colleague with a disability. Banning consideration of vulnerability in emergency management will not unify the country, but it will hamper governments’ abilities to plan for, rise to, and meet the needs of our loved ones. 

California serves groups disproportionately at risk in disasters through the Office of Access and Functional Needs within CalOES. Vance Taylor, the office chief, told me that despite the current political climate, he’s seen jurisdictions red and blue nationwide still striving to consider the needs of their most vulnerable.

“Once devastation hits that community, those lives are real and the suffering is real,” Taylor said. “So they may not call it an ‘integrative, inclusive’ process, but they will say things like ‘Well, we’re a community here. We take care of our own.’” Taylor said that an out-of-state colleague recently reached out to him, saying that while their office may be “de-woke-ifying” rhetorically, they plan to keep to the same principles. “At the end of the day, people want to help people,” he said. 

Since the Clinton era, Louisiana has held firmly red—voting for Trump by over 60 percent in the last election. But over the last 20 years, the state has stepped up to the tenets of whole community preparedness that the Trump administration is now disposing of. 

Saks, the Georgetown climate adaptation director, said that Louisiana has one of the best plans in the country to protect its coastal system and the people who live there. “Katrina hit other states, but Louisiana got the message, really big time,” he told me. The state is tackling proactive mitigation—like building floodwalls and installing pump systems—and its 2023 coastal plan uses analyses of community vulnerability (including demographic data) to determine project selection.

“They are working at the community scale, and they are not leaving people behind,” Saks said. 

If we cannot study and strategize for realities on the ground today, we will not only be a persistently unequal nation, but one increasingly less prepared to confront the disasters to come. In the words of Johnny Bradberry, former Louisiana Secretary of Transportation, “Those who fail to reap lessons learned from history are doomed to repeat its worst chapters.” 

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