No, FEMA didn’t say LGBTQ community should be favored | Fact check

An Oct. 6 Facebook post (direct link, archive link) includes a clip of a virtual Federal Emergency Management Agency discussion.
“LGBTQIA people…already are struggling,” says one of the speakers in the meeting. “They already have their own things to deal with. So, you add a disaster on top of that, it’s just compounding on itself. And I think that is maybe the why of why we are having this discussion.”
The post’s caption offers two supposed quotes from the meeting: “FEMA Disaster Preparedness Meeting: ‘We should focus our efforts on LGBTQIA people – they struggled before the storm” and “FEMA relief is no longer about getting the greatest good for the greatest amount of people – it’s about disaster equity.”
The post was shared more than 100 times in a week. Other versions of the claim spread widely on Facebook.  
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Comments made in a 2023 roundtable hosted by FEMA use similar language, but the quotes in the post are not accurate and don’t accurately portray the nature of the discussion.
The clip in the post is taken from a March 2023 roundtable discussion FEMA co-hosted called “Helping LGBTQIA+ Survivors Before Disasters: Preparedness and Mitigation Considerations.”
There are no quotes matching the ones included in the Facebook post’s caption in a transcript of the discussion, though comments with similar language were made during the event.
Justin Knighten, who was the director of FEMA’s Office of External Affairs at the time, referenced the agency’s foremost goal of equity, as outlined in its 2022-2026 Strategic Plan, at the beginning of the discussion. He went on to describe how underserved communities can be disproportionately affected by climate change, which is when he made a statement similar to the one included in the Facebook post.
Here’s an extended version of his actual quote:  
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Later in the discussion, Tyler Atkins, a FEMA emergency management specialist and the discussion’s moderator, says something similar in part of the discussion featured in the Facebook post.
“LGBTQIA people, and people who have been disadvantaged already, are struggling,” says Atkins. “They already have their own things to deal with. So when you add a disaster on top of that, it’s just compounding on itself.”
But neither Atkins nor Knighten explicitly says, “We should focus our efforts on LGBTQIA people.”
At one point, Maggie Jarry, who is identified as an employee of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, not FEMA, offered remarks that had some overlap with the second quote in the Facebook post.
Here’s her actual quote:
However, she does not work for FEMA, and she is not describing a FEMA policy. She went on to say that the emergency management sector should assess policies to determine “to what extent they have disadvantaged communities that have less assets, communities that have pre-existing vulnerabilities in accessing disaster-related recovery supports.”
Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Samira Burns said the social media characterization of Jarry’s comments is “extremely misleading” and excludes important context, noting that the discussion was about “disaster preparedness and mitigation, not disaster funding.” The department houses the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Jarry works for.
No one who works for FEMA called for prioritizing LGBTQ people over the “greatest good for the greatest amount of people.”
FEMA documentation makes clear that a call for disaster equity doesn’t mean the LGBTQ community would be prioritized over others, as the Facebook post suggests.
FEMA’s “Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility in Exercises: Considerations and Best Practices Guide,” which is shown in one version of the claim, and the agency’s aforementioned strategic plan, cite President Joe Biden’s January 2021 executive order in defining equity as the “consistent and systemic fair, just and impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment, such as … lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer – LGBTQ+ – persons.”
The strategic plan states that the Stafford Act requires FEMA to deliver aid “in an equitable and impartial manner, without discrimination on the grounds of race, color, religion, nationality, sex, age, disability, English proficiency or economic status.”
USA TODAY has debunked an array of claims involving FEMA and its priorities, including false assertions that FEMA has been directed to “help white people last,” that Biden’s administration spent FEMA hurricane relief money on “illegals” and that FEMA loans money to disaster victims and takes their land if it’s not paid back.
USA TODAY reached out to FEMA and several users who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive responses.
Lead Stories and PolitiFact also debunked the claim.  
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