Minting Ends Meet: Cash Transfers as a Disaster Relief Tool

MINTING ENDS MEET: CASH TRANSFERS AS A DISASTER RELIEF TOOL

Denton A. Cohen

Abstract: While cash transfer programs (CTPs) have shown impressive efficacy in empowering marginalized populations and building resilience to economic shocks, CTPs have yet to be adopted in the United States as a disaster tool. Weaving together three separate literatures on the production of social vulnerability and inequity in coping capacity, on procedural vulnerability and FEMA, and on the utility of cash transfers – this paper makes the case that CTPs possess valuable, untapped potential in a disaster resilience context. This paper proposes two alternate and overlapping program designs, and discusses multiple paths forward for the study and implementation of disaster-based CTPs. Additionally, by exploring their benefits for disaster resilience, this paper contributes to the growing body of support for the adoption of Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs by local, state, and federal governments.

Introduction

Cash transfers – periodic provisions of small, standard amounts of cash, typically to low-income families – have won widespread recognition as a powerful tool to combat poverty and poor health outcomes, particularly in the developing world (Banerjee et al. 2019; Bastagli et al. 2019; Ivaschenko et al. 2018). As a substitute for (or an addition to) more restrictive welfare programs such as food stamps or housing vouchers, cash transfer programs (CTPs) allow recipients to spend funds freely and according to their needs (Kabeer and Waddington 2015). While some CTPs are means-tested – conditioned on certain criteria, such as an income threshold or disability status – they can also be designed to be universal and non-means-tested in nature (Banerjee et al. 2019; Standing 2008). Beyond their everyday benefits, CTPs have displayed effectiveness in helping people and communities withstand economic shocks by increasing coping capacity, alleviating the impact of employment loss, and generating better health outcomes (Aizer et al. 2016; Kabeer and Waddington 2015; Ranganathan and Lagarde 2012).

While poverty, social isolation, and job insecurity are often cited as drivers of disaster vulnerability, CTPs are yet to receive significant attention as a disaster mitigation and preparedness tool (Cutter et al. 2006; Elliott and Pais 2006; Fothergill and Peek 2004; Ivaschenko et al., 2020). Household- and individual-focused disaster relief efforts instead center around targeted restrictive programs, such as property insurance, funeral assistance, and crisis counseling (Currie 2018). Taken together, these relief programs fall short in building coping capacity and in many cases widen pre-existing wealth gaps present in target populations (Howell and Elliott 2019; Reid 2013; Rivera et al. 2021).

Still, the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically shifted the window of possibility for CTPs in the United States. In the year following the first cases of community spread of the virus in the U.S., Congress authorized hundreds of billions of dollars of direct cash assistance in the form of so-called stimulus checks – an unprecedented action in both nature and scale. Not only did this cash assistance program enjoy broad political support and help millions of families ease economic strife, it demonstrated the ability of the federal government to deliver direct aid during times of crisis (Buckles 2020; Han et al. 2020). While disasters triggered by natural hazards typically (though not always) generate more geographically acute impacts, they levy the most sizable burden on minority and low-income communities, and their economic impacts can be just as dire as the direct impacts of the hazard itself. Given the success and popularity of national CTPs during COVID-19, the window of opportunity for further adoption of CTPs in disaster (and non-disaster) settings has been cracked open, if not more.

In this paper, I explore two potential models for disaster-focused cash transfer programs in the U.S.: rapid-response cash transfers and continuing cash transfers. Above all, I argue that CTPs have the potential to a) build bottom-up resilience by increasing coping capacity and reducing procedural vulnerability and b) constitute a transformative method of disaster-based structural reform, resituating power and resources in the hands of those who would normally be at risk of being shut out of disaster relief and recovery programs. At their best, cash transfers can provide a baseline of support that makes it easier for disaster victims to absorb the economic shock of a disaster – even when traditional disaster recovery programs fail to do so. I also argue generally that, as a universal CTP design, universal basic income (UBI) programs possess immense and underappreciated potential in the disaster realm.

To do so, I begin with a thorough review of the literature on social vulnerability, first critiquing the concept of social vulnerability for its passive framing, and then demonstrating how disparities in coping capacity produce social vulnerability before, during, and after disasters. Then, I present the literature on existing Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster relief programs and their failure to adequately reach marginalized peoples and communities. I follow this by establishing cash transfers as an innovative and transformational resilience tactic when instituted alongside more traditional programs. I conclude with an overview of the limitations of cash transfer programs in the disaster planning realm and a discussion of possibilities for CTP design.

Literature Review

Disaster Outcomes and Social Vulnerability

While the field of disaster vulnerability had previously focused more on the physical and logistical side of planning, a new generation of scholarship began to emerge in the 21st century, particularly following Hurricane Katrina (Jacobs 2019). This new era of vulnerability scholarship broke ground in systematically naming and measuring the many social factors – such as gender, race, class, and age – that drive unequal post-disaster outcomes, ranging from mortality rates to mental health issues (Cutter et al. 2003; Flanagan et al. 2020; Peacock et al. 2012).

A great deal of research has uncovered and mapped the disparate impacts of disasters on a variety of populations. Across the board, low-income and low-wealth populations experience not only greater mortality and injury risk, but also systematically slower emergency response and job recovery, lower rates of return to housing, and worse long-term physical and mental health outcomes (Fothergill and Peek 2004; Howell and Elliott 2019; Lim et al. 2017). Scholars have observed parallel and compounding disaster impacts based on race and ethnicity, with Black and Hispanic communities often experiencing the greatest harms (Adams and Boscarino 2005; Bolin and Kurtz 2018; Fothergill et al. 1999; Luft 2016; Peacock and Girard 1997; Rivera and Miller 2007). Similarly, disproportionate disaster impacts have also been uncovered for women (Enarson 1998; Enarson et al. 2018; Peacock et al. 2012), disabled people (Peek and Stough 2010; Wolbring and Leopatra 2012), immigrants (Horton 2012), and the elderly and children (Heagele and Pacquiao 2018; Peek 2008). Many scholars have advocated for an intersectional approach to understanding social vulnerability, situating race and class as interacting variables that can combine to create specific types of vulnerability (e.g., for low-income Black mothers) (Cutter et al. 2003; Elliott and Pais 2006; Fussell and Harris 2014; Luft 2016).

The idea of class as a threat multiplier is a major throughline in the social vulnerability field; at every level, those with lower incomes are found to have lower levels of coping capacity. Drakes et al. (2021) define coping capacity as “an individual or group’s use of available resources and opportunities to absorb impacts, manage needs, and overcome the immediate and short-term effects of hazard-related losses” (1). Coping capacity is directly tied to an individual’s or a community’s financial resources and social capital, meaning systemic inequality in wealth and power translates into inequality in disaster outcomes (Parsons et al. 2016). While wealthier communities will be able to independently fund disaster resilience projects, communities that have experienced disinvestment and thus own less capital will possess diminished ability to fund disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery initiatives on their own (Pais and Elliott 2008). Wealth-based inequity in recovery is measurable on an individual level, too; research tells us that wealthier individuals are more likely to be able and willing to leverage their own savings to prepare for disasters ahead of time, evacuate to a safe place, and reconstruct property following a disaster (Fothergill and Peek 2004). Meanwhile, these class differences routinely interact with race, disability status, age, citizenship status, and other factors that may ease or worsen disaster outcomes.

Despite progress made in the disaster planning field to recognize the interaction of pre-existing inequalities and disaster outcomes, the identity-based framing of social vulnerability – as opposed to identification based on systems of oppression – remains a concept of great controversy. Deploying Black feminist theory, Jacobs (2019) argues that disaster planners and scholars have largely shied away from naming systems of oppression as drivers of inequity, instead preferring to focus on the disaster-specific effects of such inequities. Specifically, Jacobs (2019) contends that disaster scholars should be “naming sexism, racism and classism as the problems as opposed to gender, race and class (or gender, race and class in specific situations)” (33). In Jacobs’s (2019) view, which Wisner and Luce (1993) agree with, it is not sufficient to say that people with certain identities fare worse during the disasters. Without naming and tracing the structures that create these outcomes, disaster planners risk advancing the narrative that there is something inherent about the concept of social vulnerability, rather than it being socially constructed.

More importantly, the Black feminist critique of social vulnerability allows us to reframe disaster planning solutions. If the inequalities endemic to disaster outcomes stem from actively produced oppression, then deconstructing the oppressive structures governing disaster planning is a policy imperative. Short of changing national and global structures that drive inequality and maintain oppressive economic relations, altering disaster programs themselves (or social programs that have direct disaster-related implications) provides a promising avenue for change. As the next section explains, the current state of disaster relief deploys a top-down approach designed with a certain type of disaster victim in mind. This approach would shift dramatically with the advent of cash transfer programs.

FEMA Disaster Aid and Procedural Vulnerability

While we have reviewed the disparate impacts of disasters on oppressed peoples, it is also important to understand how procedural vulnerability borne out of disaster programs itself contributes to the production of oppression. Much of the literature on the limitations of existing disaster relief programs overseen by FEMA centered around how the design of structures and systems produces procedural vulnerability. Hsu et al. (2015) define procedural vulnerability as vulnerability that “arises from people’s (and peoples’) relationships to power rather than environment, and the ways that power is exercised” (309). Put differently, Rivera et al. (2021) posit that procedural vulnerability stems from not only overly complex and inaccessible program design, but from power imbalances that allow resources to be leveraged in favor of certain types of people.

In addition to direct food and temporary housing aid, the federal government – by far the largest provider of disaster response and recovery funding – relies on an assortment of programs to provide indirect financial assistance to individual disaster victims (Currie 2018; Webster 2022a; Webster 2022b). These “opt-in” programs, which require extensive paperwork to take part in, are primarily overseen by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and provide limited funding for specific needs, such as housing reconstruction, crisis counseling, legal services, and funeral assistance (Webster 2022a). The only national FEMA program that provides direct cash payments to individuals is the Disaster Unemployment Assistance program, which operates on a small scale, requires extensive paperwork to obtain, and phases out after      a few months (Federal Emergency Management Agency 2020; Webster 2022b).

Many researchers have quantified and criticized the shortcomings of this patchwork approach. Scholars have found that programs such as the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and FEMA-funded buyout programs actually worsen inequality by functioning as de facto wealth-protection programs (Howell and Elliott 2019; Nelson and Molloy 2019; Pais and Elliott 2008; Peacock et al. 2014). By setting far higher coverage limits for homeowners than renters and making it a mandatory and standard practice for property owners to purchase insurance, programs such as the National Flood Insurance Program steer the vast majority of funding away from non-homeowners. Others find immense racial and socioeconomic inequality in the provision of services such as temporary shelters and housing repair grants (Craemer 2010; Emrich et al. 2021). Drakes et al. (2021) demonstrate how renters are systematically shut out of FEMA’s Individuals and Households Program (the federal government’s largest disaster recovery program for individual assistance) because only property owners are eligible for the Repair and Replacement grant program.

Crucially, some scholars find that, even for those who are theoretically eligible for relief programs, the overly complicated, highly restrictive, deeply unaccountable, and sometimes intimidating application process prevents many low-income, Black and brown and/or immigrant disaster victims from applying (Clark-Ginsberg et al. 2021; Hooks and Miller 2006; Horton 2012; Laska et al. 2018; Mendez et al 2020; Rivera et al. 2021). In one egregious case after Hurricane Harvey, FEMA denied a low-income, elderly Black woman’s request for housing reconstruction funds because the agency erroneously claimed the flooding damage to her house was not caused by the disaster (Fernandez and Panich-Linsman 2018). Unable to obtain legal assistance, the woman moved in with her son and joined a Habitat for Humanity waitlist (Fernandez and Panich-Linsman 2018). This woman’s experience was far from an aberration; Hamel et al. (2018) uncover massive disparities in assistance provision and recovery speed post-Harvey, with low-income, immigrant, and Black and brown residents of Texas experiencing the worst outcomes.

This trend far supersedes just Hurricane Harvey. Drakes et al. (2021) demonstrate how the FEMA Individuals and Households Program, which manages a Rental Assistance Program intended to help renters replace their property and belongings, consistently falls short in serving the renter population. The IHP fails renters both by making it difficult to apply in the first place (eligible renters apply at much lower rates than homeowners) and by disbursing roughly 40% less to the average renter recipient than the average home-owning recipient.

One could make the argument that, if these programs were merely tweaked in ways that expanded the program or made it easier to navigate, that it would sufficiently cover the needs of disaster victims. However, in a case study highlighting the challenges of colonia residents in the Río Grande Valley, Rivera et al. (2021) argue that incremental changes to existing programs would still fall short. Specifically, because of fundamental and pre-existing inequities in wealth, infrastructure quality, health conditions, and political power – the result of decades of disinvestment, segregation, and disempowerment – the current array of FEMA programs further entrenches current imbalances (Rivera et al. 2021). They are designed to restore wealth; not to redistribute it.

Similarly, Reid (2013) argues that the provision of funds on a restrictive, top-down basis that provides little opportunity for legal recourse is, per se, an unequal process. Reid (2013) connects these outcomes to prevailing political attitudes that govern public spending, citing the neoliberal state’s insistence that recipients of aid prove that they are deserving of help. Much like the American welfare system, Reid (2013) claims, FEMA’s individual and household assistance programs are designed to be something that the needy must actively seek out and prove they are worthy of, and which may be restrictive in nature in that they authorize assistance only for certain goods or services (such as housing) that the state deems acceptable. In effect, conditional and restrictive aid is designed, intentionally or not, to serve a particular type of disaster victim – one who has the time, support system, legal standing, and informational wherewithal to actively seek out aid, even after a disaster.

Take this excerpt from Reid’s (2013) study:

FEMA's policies follow in a long line of “middle-classist” policies that employ implicit definitions about what constitutes a deserving assistance recipient. Middle-classist policies are designed around a particular model of person or family that reflects certain characteristics such as a nuclear family household structure and financial savings or resources to draw on … Though the programs were designed to operate the same for everyone, they had the effect of disenfranchising and further disadvantaging poor survivors, especially those not living in single-family households. This was especially true for black survivors, who tended to be members of both groups. (760-61)

The failure of disaster relief programs to reach the neediest disaster victims not only compounds the overarching social and economic structures that produce social vulnerability in the first place; it arguably constitutes one of those structures in itself. If Jacobs (2019), Rivera et al. (2021), and Reid (2013) are correct that structural issues render “vulnerability-blind” programs ineffectual, structural changes that break the production cycle of inequality are in order. The next section details how the adoption of cash transfer programs as a disaster mitigation and relief tool can serve these transformational goals.

Cash Transfer Programs

Although their popularity in the academic and political arenas is a relatively recent phenomenon, cash transfer programs in the U.S. are not a novel concept. Aizer et al.  (2016) trace the advent of American CTPs back to the Mother’s Pension Program. Established in 1911, the program was designed to help single and/or widowed mothers care for their children, and it provided monthly cash transfers with no spending restrictions. Similarly, the largest welfare program in the U.S., the Social Security program, provides unrestricted cash transfers to elderly and disabled people (and their families). While the American welfare state has much more commonly focused on non-cash restricted aid (means-tested food stamps, housing vouchers, healthcare reimbursement, etc.), unrestrictive cash transfers are not without precedent.

CTPs have wide-ranging economic and social benefits. Cash transfers allow recipients to increase their savings, normalize consumption patterns, and pursue more stable labor force participation (Fiszbein and Schady 2009; Kabeer and Waddington 2015; Ranganathan and Lagarde 2012). However, their benefits extend far beyond economic activity. Cash transfers lead to better mental and physical health outcomes (and higher utilization of healthcare services more generally) and increase social ties within and between families (Aguila et al. 2017; Attanasio et al. 2015; Bastagli et al. 2018; Courtin et al. 2018; Marinescu 2018). In other words, CTPs increase both financial resources and social capital, and by proxy, coping capacity in shock settings. Moreover, if designed to be universal, CTPs can decrease procedural vulnerability by eliminating the need to navigate a complicated screening process to receive benefits and removing the power of state actors to deny or delay benefits. Even if partially means-tested and not entirely universal, CTPs reduce procedural vulnerability by removing restrictions on expenditures and removing government from the process post-transfer.

Thus, when we consider the compounding drivers of unequal disaster outcomes – low coping capacity and high procedural inequity – it is unsurprising that cash transfer programs have proven to be useful in a disaster setting, albeit primarily in developing countries (Creti and Jaspars 2006). In a groundbreaking study of cash transfers in a disaster recovery context, Ivaschenko et al. (2020) find promising evidence that these programs can significantly improve outcomes for low-income disaster victims. The authors make use of a “natural experiment” in the small island nation of Fiji, where in 2014 Tropical Cyclone Winston caused widespread destruction across the country, killing forty-four people and causing over $1 billion in damage (Ivaschenko et al. 2020). A crucial plank of Fiji’s disaster recovery effort was to distribute one-time “top-up” transfers (roughly three times greater than the typical monthly amount) to low-income disaster victims one month after the tropical cyclone, using an existing cash transfer program and scaling up both the benefits and recipient pool (Ivaschenko et al. 2020). Ivaschenko et al. (2020) find highly encouraging results: recipients overwhelmingly spent the cash transfer on critical goods and services such as food, medicine, home repairs, and clothing and furniture replacements. More importantly, program beneficiaries rebuilt their homes significantly more quickly than the control sample – evidence that cash transfers can produce not just a tangible but a transformative impact on the disaster recovery stage (Ivaschenko et al. 2020).

Ivaschenko et al.’s (2020) research builds on a growing body of work studying cash transfers in international disaster contexts. Venton et al. (2015) posit that cash transfer programs allow recipients to access crucial goods and services that they would not have been able to otherwise, such as shelter, clothing, food, medicine, and transport. More broadly, several scholars find that CTPs have great utility before, during, and after shocks of all kinds – not just disasters triggered by natural hazards (Bailey and Harvey 2011; Independent Evaluation Group 2011; Lehmann and Masterson 2014). Ivaschenko et al. (2020) note that cash transfers will not be effective without functioning markets and/or an intact supply chain, and thus not in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Rather, the “sweet spot” for CTPs appears to be in the critical stage when supply chains have been partially restored and when there exists no mass shortage of staple goods, but when there still exists a great need for rebuilding of structures and institutions, as well as responding to humanitarian needs.

While an effective disaster measure, the most transformational aspect of CTPs may lie in their reframing and re-situation of power in both a pre- and post-disaster context. Rather than treating disaster survivors as program subjects (instead of program participants), forcing them to spend time and resources applying for aid and relying solely on government programs to get by, CTPs empower those affected by disasters to reclaim agency over rebuilding efforts. For example, typically, a family whose place of residence is made unlivable by a disaster would have to rely on a temporary housing arrangement (whether government-provided or with friends or family) while applying to a litany of relief programs to move to another permanent residence or start rebuilding their old one. This place of residence might be located far from their home, place(s) of employment, and/or social network. They may have very few of their belongings with them or may be forced to be separated from a pet (or from each other) based on shelter rules. The family may be multigenerational, responsible for the care of elderly, disabled, and/or child dependents, for whom temporary housing is inadequate.

With a CTP in place, this family could use the funds provided to them to start rebuilding their lives on their terms, to the extent possible based on market conditions. While waiting for other forms of relief, the family could replace clothing, stock up on medicine, help out needy friends, family, or community members, and purchase culturally and allergy- appropriate foods that may not be available at shelters or food banks. They may even be able to conduct      maintenance on their original place of residence – their home may only need a minor repair (such as replacing water-damaged flooring or repairing broken windows), which the CTP may allow them to pay for entirely. In other words, cash transfers allow people to access the goods and services they know they need, without the lengthy and paternalistic process of convincing the government they need them. While CTPs would not and could not replace programs that provide direct, in-kind emergency aid (and thus would not be a panacea for the delays and denials endemic to the current system), they would provide a baseline of support – and agency – to those who would ordinarily be left to fend for themselves.

Discussion

Given the inadequacy of restrictive, reactive disaster relief programs, and the urgency of the need to reduce disaster vulnerability, CTPs present a compelling opportunity to proactively shift power and resources into the hands of those who need it the most. Below, I discuss two distinct (but non-mutually exclusive) models for what a cash transfer program could look like in a disaster context.

Rapid Response Transfers

A rapid-response transfer program would leverage existing welfare and disaster relief programs to provide direct cash assistance to people affected by disasters. In the absence of a pre-existing basic income program, where the vast majority of households are already enrolled in a program that provides monthly cash transfers, rapid-response transfers would allow governments to improvise payments to all people within certain geographic boundaries. The structure of rapid-response transfers is outlined in Figure 1 below.

Similar to the COVID-19 stimulus program, direct deposits could be provided using geographically defined tax return information, and cash could be provided at shelters, temporary housing facilities, and community centers such as places of worship, food banks, recreation centers, and parks. Pre-registration could also be achieved through leveraging everyday contact points between people and government agencies such as the U.S. Postal Service or local motor vehicle bureaus. Another set of channels through which to register participants and provide benefits is through pre-existing programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which already provide cash or cash-like benefits to low-income households. Depending on the type and severity of the disaster, payments could be distributed at regular (weekly or monthly) intervals, phasing out over certain time horizons.

For example, in the case of a wildfire that causes evacuation orders to be issued for 10,000 households spanning two municipalities and four ZIP codes, FEMA could authorize direct transfers to households with addresses (or, for those without addresses, stated residences) within those defined boundaries, and hand out cash payments at shelters and temporary housing facilities. The “application process” would consist of a simple attestation to living at a certain address (or an equivalent attestation for unhoused individuals), and for those with direct deposits tied to eligible addresses, there would be no application process at all. Such a database could be compiled by FEMA by cooperating horizontally (with other federal agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture) and vertically (with local and state agencies such as welfare agencies, taxation agencies, and motor vehicle departments).

By providing a low-effort way to access the program on the front end and full autonomy over spending on the back end, rapid response transfers would decrease procedural vulnerability for all disaster victims, even where other programs failed. Unlike other disaster programs contingent on lengthy reviews of eligibility, rapid-response transfers could kick in instantaneously and scale up quickly, providing a baseline of support to the most marginalized populations, for whom other forms of disaster aid may never materialize.

This type of transfer program would not, however, overcome the challenges that many other disaster programs encounter with reaching eligible participants. Moreover, a rapid-response design comes with considerable weaknesses in its ability to increase coping capacity, compared to alternate designs. Because the preparedness stage is crucial for determining disaster outcomes, and because rapid-response transfers would be focused on the recovery phase, this design would fall short in providing relief in the preparedness stage. Its design is more reactive than proactive, and a superior design would involve a standing cash transfer program, designed to scale up during times of disaster.

Continuing Transfers

A continuing transfer program would be a basic income program with built-in disaster protections. Using a pre-existing cash transfer program, such as a basic income program, that is already providing periodic and regular transfers to recipients, the government agency overseeing the program could scale it up to meet seasonal disaster needs (in flood- or wildfire-prone areas), and/or acute post-disaster needs. The structure of continuing transfer programs is outlined in Figure 2 below.

Consider this excerpt from Ivaschenko et al. (2020), which explains why this approach is advantageous:

Long-term social protection programmes are increasingly being linked with emergency cash transfer projects to make them shock-responsive. This can protect vulnerable households from shocks ex ante through predictable cash transfers that help them to build resilience; they can be scaled up ex post to respond to extreme events. In addition, this is an efficient way of getting emergency cash to people, [utilizing] existing delivery systems and beneficiary databases. [Programs] can be scaled up vertically (providing additional resources to existing beneficiaries) or horizontally (adding more beneficiaries), depending on the needs and capacity of the prevailing system. (459)

Take, for example, a catastrophic hurricane affecting a coastal town in South Carolina that had a pre-existing basic income program for low-income residents. The program could be proactively designed with a modest scale-up during hurricane season (June to November), or, alternatively, simply designed to scale up in the aftermath of a hurricane. After a brief disruption immediately following the storm, the town could – likely with the assistance of state or federal aid – restore service and take advantage of the basic income program to provide even greater benefits to program participants. The town could choose to enroll greater numbers of people in the program, recruiting participants at disaster shelters and temporary housing facilities, and phasing out benefits later in the process as recovery needs are increasingly met.

The continuing transfer design’s advantage over the rapid-response design lies not only in its more straightforward ability to reach program participants after a disaster, but also in its ability to build coping capacity before a disaster occurs. With extra savings and social capital in hand, those enrolled in the program would have greater resources with which to install protective infrastructure in their place of residence, greater ability to collectively evacuate (via leveraging financial resources and social ties), and enhanced capability to help family, friends, neighbors, and strangers during times of crisis. While rapid-response transfers could help in the recovery stage, a continuing transfer design builds resilience throughout the entire process.

Still, although the rapid-response transfer design is inferior in many ways, it represents the more politically feasible way to institute a disaster CTP. Slimmer in cost because of its more temporary nature, and perhaps more amenable to a pilot program design, rapid-response programs – or even a hybrid CTP design that leverages pre-existing non-cash transfer welfare programs – may be the most feasible path forward. The next section discusses the multiple avenues through which CTPs can be further studied and implemented in disaster settings.

The Path Forward

Because of the scarce usage of disaster-specific CTPs such as the one implemented by Fiji, disaster-focused CTP literature is still in its nascent stage globally, and literature on the topic is non-existent in a U.S. context. The growing popularity of basic income programs – and the potential for low-cost pilot programs – means that cash transfers’ absence in disaster policy discussions should soon change.

The most likely path forward for further study of CTPs in a disaster context lies with the cash transfer programs that already exist. According to an index maintained by Business Insider, as of December 2021, at least thirty-three cities and states have implemented limited basic income programs, most of which are pilot programs that provide periodic cash transfers to relatively small numbers of low-income participants (Lalljee, 2021). Most of these projects are being implemented with the help of researchers (with control groups already identified), and many have been undertaken by cities and states where disasters are relatively common, such as Los Angeles, Shreveport, Louisiana, New York State, and New Orleans. These projects vary in size and benefit level, but if a major disaster were to occur in an area with a basic income program, it is highly likely that they would lend themselves conveniently to a quasi-experimental study, where the effects of the program on disaster outcomes could be tested and quantified.

Another option along these lines would be to construct a pilot program, similar to the aforementioned programs, with the key differences being the incorporation of disaster planning from the ground up and location in a disaster-prone area. By formulating plans for scaling up benefits, ensuring continuity of post-disaster cash provision, and collecting key disaster-related data points (such as physical condition of residence, mental and physical health indicators, etc., both pre- and post-disaster), the program could provide illuminative information on the effectiveness of CTPs in an American disaster context. An example could be a disaster cash transfer pilot program in a community lying in a major coastal floodplain and hurricane hotspot, in anticipation of a major storm happening sometime in the near future.

Finally, the ultimate realization of cash transfers in a disaster context would be a permanent UBI program, administered across an entire state or locality – or the entirety of the United States. The state of Alaska is the only jurisdiction in the U.S. with anything resembling a permanent UBI program. The Alaska Permanent Fund, established using oil revenues, provides an annual payment to all adult Alaska residents (apart from incarcerated people) between roughly $1,000 and $2,500, although it varies year to year (Goldsmith 2012; Jones and Marinescu 2022). This program deviates from a traditional UBI format in that its provision is annual rather than monthly and that benefits are not fixed but rather fluctuate based on oil prices and drilling trends. Even so, the Alaska Permanent Fund provides a rough blueprint for what statewide or national UBIs could look like. UBI programs provide a best-case scenario in terms of procedural equity – enrollment would ideally be automatic and universal – and coping capacity, by providing transfers before and after disasters, and maintaining continuity between disasters to build resilience. As outlined in the continuing transfer design section, the only disaster-specific steps necessary for powerful disaster resilience effects would be to design logistical and financial plans for benefit scale-ups.

Limitations

It is important to come to terms with CTPs’ limitations in assisting disaster victims in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. While cash transfers may help residents prepare in the run-up to a disaster and then recover on the back end, transfers do not produce the same effect in the period immediately following a disaster. In fact, CTPs could have an undesired inflationary impact in cases where markets are dysfunctional or have already failed, inundating supply-constrained markets with a flood of demand (Bailey and Harvey 2011; Gentilini 2007; Ivaschenko et al. 2020). Cash transfers lose their utility when people have nothing to purchase or when immediate survival is the only consideration, which makes disaster response planning, including for search-and-rescue efforts and direct food and shelter aid, so important (Ivaschenko et al. 2020; Bailey and Hedlund 2012).

Beyond in-kind aid that provides direct disaster response resources, CTPs should also not be designed as a substitute for inequity-ridden disaster programs housed under FEMA. Cash transfers would never be able to fully cover the costs of catastrophic damage to residences and personal property. Rather, CTPs merely serve as a baseline that diminish the effect of procedural barriers set up in other relief programs. Even in the presence of a generous disaster CTP, existing recovery aid programs should be overhauled to reduce procedural inequity and more comprehensively respond to the needs of its most disenfranchised target populations.

Additionally, cash transfers may still struggle to reach marginalized populations. Especially among unhoused and/or undocumented people in the U.S., problems persist in delivering aid even to those who would be eligible. Although programs could be designed to be opt-out rather than opt-in (by automatically registering participants), such a design would still struggle to reach populations who avoid contact with government agencies and have such low levels of trust in government that they would actively avoid enrolling even if they knew about the program. It follows, then, that without fixing wide-ranging social problems and remedying long-standing state-imposed harms, many of the problems endemic to current disaster programs would arise with CTPs as well.

Even so, a disaster setting has features that may allow governments to reach typically inaccessible and marginalized people. First, disasters bring a fleet of bureaucrats, first responders, social workers, and volunteers to at-risk areas: these public servants can be mobilized to deliver aid directly to needy populations. Additionally, disasters often result in people being concentrated in common spaces such as community centers, shelters and temporary housing, and food banks, making it less labor-intensive and more cost-effective to provide rapid assistance to large numbers of people. The literature also tells us that it is possible to leverage existing welfare supply chains and government data to reach as many people as possible. At the very least, all recipients of some form of government cash assistance (such as unemployment, disability, welfare, etc.) living in a disaster-impacted area could instantly receive benefits if the provision of one or more of these services uses direct deposit technology. Even tax returns could be utilized in a similar way to the COVID-19 stimulus program; all residents who had filed taxes for addresses within a certain ZIP code could receive their cash transfer deposit from the IRS (Carlisle, 2020). Current disaster aid programs are unable to automatically provide benefits because of strict eligibility requirements contingent on the nature of each program, such as having to document and prove that one’s place of residence underwent damage. Non-means-tested CTPs would skip the expensive and exclusionary step of eligibility screening altogether.

Finally, a major limitation is the cost necessary to design, implement, and maintain a cash transfer program. Although non-means-tested CTPs are cost-effective to administer by virtue of spending far less time and resources on screening participants, they would still generate substantial costs by providing direct cash benefits to a large number of people. The costs may make it politically difficult to secure the funds necessary for CTPs, whether as a rapid-response design or as a much more ambitious continuing transfer program. Despite this, a Cash Transfer Program’s many social and economic benefits could far outweigh its costs.

Conclusion

The utility of this assessment of CTPs is twofold. First, to suggest that disaster-specific cash transfer programs should be considered by government agencies (namely, FEMA) as a redistributive, resilience-building, transformative addition to the current regime of relief programs. Second, to contribute more theoretical support for the adoption of Universal Basic Income programs. While UBIs would produce an array of socially and economically desirable effects, an unforeseen and yet profoundly impactful effect may be their efficacy in helping oppressed and marginalized peoples withstand disasters.

As climate change makes disasters both more common and more extreme, policymakers and planners must respond. Thinking transformatively and radically is a policy imperative, not just in a disaster context, but in the context of the political, economic, and social engines that power inequality and injustice. Cash transfer programs may play a critical role in the future of American disaster planning, but only if researchers and policymakers alike begin to treat them as a legitimate disaster tool instead of a fringe safety net fad.