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— icluding, 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.
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 U.S.”
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 ten years before the pandemic, FEMA received about 6,000 applications for funeral assistance for various natural disasters. As of January 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.
