Press Releases

BATON ROUGE, LA – U.S. Representatives Garret Graves and Troy Carter introduced legislation to extend the Duplication of Benefits (DoB) relief provision in the Disaster Recovery Reform Act (DRRA) of 2018 for an additional five years. Without this legislation, the provision will expire this year, putting both current and future disaster victims at risk. The legislation also states that the fix applies to all 2016 Flood victims - preventing federal agencies like the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) from adding new eligibility requirements for victims who became eligible for federal assistance after Graves’s DoB fix became law in 2018.

“The federal government has spent less time expediting the recovery process for our community than they have developing reasons why we shouldn’t receive recovery assistance at all. Their crazy policies have made it nearly impossible for families to recover, and our bill changes this trajectory. We promised the 2016 Flood victims that we would not give up – and the majority of Duplication of benefits victims were promised relief through our previous efforts. We aren’t going to stop until the remaining flood victims receive the relief that they deserve,” Graves said.

“Storms don’t discriminate. They affect us all, regardless of race, political party, or socioeconomic status,” Carter said. “Our bipartisan bill would allow governors to ask the federal government not to consider a loan a duplication of a grant following a disaster. It’s wrong to tell someone desperate to return home after a storm that because they took out a loan, they will be unable to benefit from future federal programs. A loan is not a grant, and I’ll happily provide a copy of the dictionary to anyone who thinks otherwise.”

Background:

After the 2016 Flood, the Louisiana delegation secured $2.9 billion in Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) funds to help flood victims rebuild and protect our community from future flooding events.

However, under a flawed federal policy, recovery funds promised to victims were reduced or eliminated if a homeowner had qualified for a federal disaster recovery loan from the Small Business Administration (SBA). Because the homeowner was already approved for a federal disaster loan, HUD stated it would be a “duplication of benefits” for them to also receive a federal recovery grant from the CDBG-DR program. While SBA loans are required to be repaid to the federal government, CDBG-DR grants were one-time payments to victims and do not require repayment.

In 2018, Graves worked with the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to include language in DRRA to clarify that a loan is not duplicative of a grant because they are different kinds of assistance made available by the federal government at different times after a disaster.

But, when HUD implemented Graves’s DoB fix, the agency said that a loan is still considered duplicative of a grant if a homeowner makes more than 120 percent of the area median income (AMI). As a result, many remaining DoB homeowners were prevented from accessing the grant dollars, even if they had simply applied for a loan and never received it. The AMI requirement did not apply to original flood victims, only those who had received eligibility through the DRRA DoB fix. Graves and Carter’s legislation clarifies that HUD cannot use an additional income test to determine eligibility for duplication of benefits relief.

This legislation will get critical rebuilding funds to the remaining victims.