Multilingual emergency alerts allegedly hit by Trump administration's anti-DEI campaign

Congressional leaders are begging the federal government to fulfill its promises to modernize the national wireless emergency alert system, as severe weather events plague communities.

In a letter sent this week to Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, California Representative Nanette Diaz Barragán called out the FCC for delaying a years-long effort to provide multilingual Wireless Emergency Alerts for wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and 911 outages. The importance of such communications was made more clear during the January wildfire disaster in Los Angeles.

The plan was approved in 2023 and set to go into effect in January, providing 18 alert templates in 13 of the most commonly spoken languages in the U.S. for use by nationwide authorities and all major wireless providers. The system would bypass the need for translators, speed up wireless alerts across devices, and require mobile service providers pre-install multilingual alerts.

But the Trump administration's new leadership has balked at deploying the system.

“You’ve got about 68 million Americans that use a language other than English and everybody should have the ability to to understand these emergency alerts. We shouldn’t be looking at any politicization of alerts — certainly not because someone’s an immigrant or they don’t know English," Barragán told the Los Angeles Times. Carr was previously an advocate for the alert modernization effort, but has delayed publishing the new rules in the Federal Register.

Instead, the FCC has spent the last four months investigating companies, organizations, and federal contractors for diversity-related spending and content decisions, including NPR and PBS broadcasts, Disney, and CBS. In March, Verizon capitulated to the administration's anti-DEI goals and ended its "DEI-related practices" in order to finalize a $20 billion purchase of broadband provider Frontier Communications.

Meanwhile, advocacy coalitions, including the AAPI Equity Alliance, called the stalled effort a "real dereliction of duty" and a direct attack on immigrants, the LA Times reported.

Emergency alerts have become a crucial lifesaving tool as natural disasters increase in size and frequency, a foreseen consequence of the global climate crisis. But the country's alert system has struggled to scale up in accuracy and access, and a lack of federal funding for organizations like the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS) are doing little to help.