The Politics of Disaster Relief Operations: The Case of U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency

Disaster relief requires the involvement of political actors as decision‐makers who may be influenced by self‐serving biases or political considerations. This study extends public choice theory and introduces the role of congressional representation to examine how political considerations may impact the response of government‐run disaster relief operations. We use the context of the US‐based Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to test how alignment between political actors, electoral significance, and placement of congressional representation, affect the response of FEMA, measured by response time and allocation of resources. Using fixed effects models on a dataset of over 20,000 county‐level disaster observations from 2002 to 2020, we find evidence that political considerations influence response to disaster relief operations. Our analysis reveals that states with greater representation on FEMA's congressional oversight committees receive increased resource allocations for operational response. We also find that response times are shorter, and resource allocations are greater for “swing” states, which carry a high level of electoral significance for political actors. While we do not observe, overall, a significant effect of alignment between federal and state‐level political decision‐makers on disaster relief response, we do find evidence that response varies across presidential administrations, impacting response times for disaster declarations.