Physical Address

304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124

No, FEMA didn’t say LGBTQ community should be favored | Fact check

An Oct. 6 Facebook post (direct link, archive link) includes a clip of a virtual Federal Emergency Management Agency discussion.
“LGBTQIA people…already are struggling,” says one of the speakers in the meeting. “They already have their own things to deal with. So, you add a disaster on top of that, it’s just compounding on itself. And I think that is maybe the why of why we are having this discussion.”
The post’s caption offers two supposed quotes from the meeting: “FEMA Disaster Preparedness Meeting: ‘We should focus our efforts on LGBTQIA people – they struggled before the storm” and “FEMA relief is no longer about getting the greatest good for the greatest amount of people – it’s about disaster equity.”
The post was shared more than 100 times in a week. Other versions of the claim spread widely on Facebook.  
Fact check roundup: Hurricane paths, FEMA response spur dangerous misinformation
More from the Fact-Check Team: How we pick and research claims | Email newsletter | Facebook page
Comments made in a 2023 roundtable hosted by FEMA use similar language, but the quotes in the post are not accurate and don’t accurately portray the nature of the discussion.
The clip in the post is taken from a March 2023 roundtable discussion FEMA co-hosted called “Helping LGBTQIA+ Survivors Before Disasters: Preparedness and Mitigation Considerations.”
There are no quotes matching the ones included in the Facebook post’s caption in a transcript of the discussion, though comments with similar language were made during the event.
Justin Knighten, who was the director of FEMA’s Office of External Affairs at the time, referenced the agency’s foremost goal of equity, as outlined in its 2022-2026 Strategic Plan, at the beginning of the discussion. He went on to describe how underserved communities can be disproportionately affected by climate change, which is when he made a statement similar to the one included in the Facebook post.
Here’s an extended version of his actual quote:  

en_USEnglish