Disaster Assistance Improvement Program
Providing Citizens with a Single Disaster Assistance Portal
Hurricane Katrina resulted in a public mandate to dramatically improve delivery of government assistance to those affected by disaster. In the two years since Katrina, 122 presidentially-declared national disasters have caused injury and death, destroyed homes and businesses, and disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
Executive Order: Improving Assistance for Disaster Victims (EO 13411, 8/29/06) directed the Secretary of Homeland Security to lead an interagency task force. The Task Force's mission: Get Federal assistance to disaster victims more quickly and efficiently.
The Task Force released the Disaster Assistance Improvement Plan (DAIP) on March 1, 2007 and it was signed by the President on September 14, 2007. The deadline for creating and launching the disaster benefits portal is ambitious: December 31, 2008. Already, teams are in place gathering and analyzing technical requirements in parallel in order to identify what will be required to have disaster assistance programs from various agencies interface with the DAIP solution.
DAIP outlines a strategy for creating an on-line disaster benefits portal:
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Disaster victims may start on GovBenefits.gov by answering a series of questions to determine the appropriate disaster assistance benefits programs for their situation. No personal identifying information will be requested during this screening.
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After the initial screening, individuals will be presented with a list of benefit programs for which they may be eligible for - and will be offered a link to the FEMA Individual Assistance Center (IAC) system to apply immediately for those programs that are part of the single consolidated application.
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Disaster Victims will complete the application on the IAC and the data will be sent to the appropriate partner agencies for simultaneous processing.
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Partner agency systems will send information back to the IAC so that disaster victims can the status of their applications at each agency.
When the portal is live, all Federal disaster assistance programs will be listed for the disaster victims following the screening process. It is anticipated however, that only Category 1 programs will not be fully integrated into the portal by December 2008 due to technical complexity or because some programs are administered by states and local entities.
Those programs not yet integrated will be clearly noted and a link will be provided to the appropriate agency's website for more information and application instructions. In this way, the portal will be a valuable one-stop resource for disaster benefits information even before all Federal disaster benefits programs are integrated.
After the initial launch, and subject to funding, the remaining Federal and appropriate State programs will be integrated to continually expand and improve the portal.
Last Modified: Monday, 14-Jan-2008 12:28:46 EST