The Politicization of Disaster Relief.

• Author: Horwitz, Steven
• Position: BRIEFLY NOTED

As the COVID-19 crisis was exploding in late March 2020, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer claimed that medical supply "vendors are being told [by the federal government] not to send stuff here to Michigan." She asserted that her state had "been uniquely singled out" because of her criticizing President Trump's response to the pandemic.

We don't know if her allegation is correct. However, a recent study does suggest that states that supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election appear to have received small-business loans as a percentage of eligible payroll that were much larger than the coastal states that he lost. Rural Midwestern states like the Dakotas and Nebraska got funds that covered 70% or more of their eligible payroll. The comparable numbers for New York and California were 40% and 38% respectively, or about half of what the Trump-supporting states got.

For many, such favoritism is seen as a unique feature of the Trump administration. However, the politicization of resource allocation in a crisis is nothing new. Here we provide a brief overview of research finding that political considerations influence the allocation of aid during crises.

The New Deal / Economic historian Gavin Wright examined the disparate distribution of loans and relief during the New Deal era with an eye to explaining the generous aid directed to western states and the paucity of aid flowing to the South. Wright used simple cross-state regression models to compare the influence of economic variables (e.g., unemployment) and political variables on both the allocation of spending and work relief jobs across states. His results suggest that political factors contributed to the pattern of relief and he points to the high variability of Democratic voting in western states as a key factor in the generous level of aid directed to those states. The implication is that the Roosevelt administration steered aid to states where it would be of most use in getting the president reelected. By contrast, the South had a strong tendency to vote Democratic so there was less need to steer aid to those states.

Wright was not the only one to make this observation. Robert Fleck revisited the cross-state allocation of aid and concluded that "electoral variables do matter [in the allocation of New Deal spending] and their influence is substantial." Disaster aid can be understood as a way to buy votes in states where the marginal voter matters for electoral success. Politicians are smart...