Appeals Court Orders FEMA to Release Hurricane Aid Records
A federal appellate court ruled that the Federal Emergency Management Agency must make public the addresses, but not the names, of 600,000 households that received $1.2 billion in aid after the 2004 hurricane season. Three Gannett newspapers in Florida and the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel had filed separate suits for the names and addresses of the aid recipients after widespread indications of fraud. “Disclosure of the addresses will help … by shedding light on whether FEMA has been a good steward of billions of taxpayer dollars in the wake of several natural disasters across the country, and we cannot find any privacy interests here that even begin to outweigh this public interest,” the court said in ruling on the consolidated cases. (6/25/07)