U.S. relief agency FEMA did not say it will execute 70-80,000 people

Context

Social media users are circulating an old audio clip of U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin claiming it is a U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) representative saying they "planned to execute between 70-80 thousand" people.

In the clip, the speaker can be heard saying, "We planned to execute between 70-80 thousand... "we planned to evacuate between 70-80 thousand people."

On TikTok, over 500 videos have been made using the audio file, with some gaining hundreds of thousands of views. Examples of viral videos can be seen here, here, and here. Many videos are accompanied by the caption "Fema saying the quiet part out loud."

Similar posts are being shared on X (formerly Twitter), with posts gaining hundreds of thousands of views. Archived examples of such posts can be found here, here, and here. 

However, the claim is false, and the statement has no relation to FEMA. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made the statement during a hearing in 2021 about evacuation operations from Afghanistan. 

In fact

Using keyword searches from the statement, we found the original audio and video published by Grabien, an online multimedia marketplace. The statement was not made by a FEMA official but by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin during a hearing at the Senate Armed Services Committee on September 28, 2021, about evacuation operations in Afghanistan.

The discussion during the Senate hearing referred to the evacuation operations and withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021. Austin describes how the plan was to evacuate 70-80,000 people, but the number was increased to more than 124,000 because of refugees fleeing the new Taliban regime. These were foreign nationals and Afghans, many of whom had supported the U.S. and Afghan forces during the 20-year-long U.S. presence in Afghanistan. The "evacuation" in the audio clip does not refer to any civilian evacuation in relation to any hurricane.

The hearing was filmed by C-SPAN, and the slip-up can be heard at the 22:10 mark of the video. On the same day, the U.S. Department of Defense published a transcription of Austin's speech, but it did not include the slip. 

The following day, on September 29, 2021, Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin gave the same speech at the House Armed Services Committee Hearing on Afghanistan Withdrawal. He made a similar speech error during this speech, saying, "We planned to execute *pause* we planned to evacuate between 70-80,000 people."

Logically Facts has found no evidence that FEMA made such a statement or a similar one. Lead Stories and Snopes fact-checked the claim and reached the same conclusion. We have also contacted FEMA for a comment on the matter.

Mandatory evacuation orders were issued for Hurricane Helene on September 25 and the oncoming Hurricane Milton on October 7 in Florida, but these were issued by local authorities and not FEMA. 

The claim is being shared in the context of conspiratorial narratives and criticism of FEMA following Hurricane Helene. Logically Facts has already fact-checked several false claims following the storm, including that it was created by HAARP and falsely attributed footage of the storm.

The verdict

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made the statement and slip in 2021, not FEMA. Therefore, we have marked this claim as false.