As the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) carries out widely-criticized responses to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, officials say the agency’s Disaster Recovery Fund is incapable of handling a third major storm.
While some are circulating false accusations that disaster funds have been diverted to immigrants or poured into the proxy war in Ukraine, a review of the agency’s 2024 outlays reveals a different, ongoing drain on FEMA’s coffers: Long after the end of the declared Covid-19 emergency, FEMA is still pumping out billions of dollars to pay for pandemic expenses — including, believe it or not, up to $9,000 each for funerals.
As previously detailed at Stark Realities, governments’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic was disastrous on many fronts. While the Pandora’s box of collateral damage included widespread harm to the physical and mental health of individuals, it also dealt a blow to the nation’s fiscal well-being, as the federal government recklessly showered trillions of dollars it didn’t have on people, businesses and state and local governments — with much of that money intended to offset the effects of government’s own tyrannical and counterproductive policies.
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While all but the most diehard Branch Covidians have moved on from that dark chapter, the federal government has a distinct version of “long Covid.” Though it’s not clear where all the money is going, FEMA is paying up to $9,000 each to reimburse funeral expenses for those who die from Covid.
That’s an especially odd example of government picking winners and losers. As Stanford University School of Medicine professor and prominent Covid-regime critic Jay Bhattacharya said in a social media post that drew my attention to this giveaway program and its hyper-longevity, “There are apparently more and less worthy ways to die in the US.”
Indeed: Why is the family of someone who dies from Covid more deserving of a government-paid funeral than the family of someone who dies from cancer, cardiac arrest or a car accident? It bears emphasis that this question was every bit as relevant in 2020 as it is today.
The favoring of one cause of death over another isn’t the only winners-and-losers dimension of the funeral program: There’s no reimbursement for those who’d planned ahead via pre-paid funerals. Echoing the grievances of people who saved up to pay for college only to see their neighbor’s student loans forgiven by vote-buying politicians, some families say they feel like they’re being punished for having planned for the future.
This isn’t FEMA’s first funereal foray, but it’s the largest by orders of magnitude. In the 10 years before the pandemic, FEMA received about 6,000 applications for funeral assistance for various natural disasters. As of Jan. 1, 2024, FEMA had approved more than 300,000 for Covid-19, shelling out $3.15 billion to cover an expense that, whether caused by a pandemic or something else, is universally inevitable.
Of course, the magnitude of that inevitable expense isn’t fixed, and the mere presence of a government subsidy reliably results in higher costs. Knowing they can spend up to $9,000 of other people’s money on their Covid-19 funeral, it’s safe to assume many affected families have made more expensive choices than they otherwise would — bolstering the profits of funeral homes, casket producers and other associated businesses.
Unsurprisingly, the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), a trade group and principal lobbyist for the industry, hailed the passage of the COVID 19 Relief Package/Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2020. The legislation not only funded Covid funeral reimbursements, NFDA enthused, but also funeral payments “for any subsequent major disaster declared by the President,” an expansion the group had been lobbying for.
To qualify for reimbursement under the funeral assistance program, the death certificate must either indicate the death was caused by Covid-19 — or that it merely may have been caused by Covid-19 or “Covid-19-like symptoms.”
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As is increasingly the case with government handouts, there’s no requirement of US citizenship, for either the decedent or the person paying the funeral expenses. A family’s ability to pay for the funeral is likewise irrelevant — there are no income or wealth criteria.
There’s more to the cost of this program than the reimbursements themselves — there’s also significant overhead. Pressed to implement the program as soon as possible, FEMA opted against creating a website to receive applications for reimbursement, choosing to instead require that all claims be submitted via 20-minute phone conversations, necessitating the creation of a huge call center operation staffed by 5,000 phone agents, all of whom would require training and support.
While you might think word-of-mouth would be sufficient to encourage widespread use of a handout program, still more money was spent on advertising. In a 2022 report lamenting that many eligible people hadn’t cashed in yet, NPR’s Blake Farmer — blissfully oblivious to the federal government’s relentless march to insolvency — cheerfully said “FEMA is launching an outreach campaign to promote the program, since there’s plenty of money left.”
Fittingly, NPR found the national leader in funeral reimbursement claims at the time was Washington DC, with applications amounting to 77% of Covid-19 fatalities.
