The Washington Post has an article that says there was waste in the hasty spending of money after Hurricane Katrina.
I wrote about similar waste in a BenchWarmerJim News Roundup. This latest revelation in the WaPo says the government wasted even more money.
As the Federal Emergency Management Agency wraps up the initial phase of its temporary housing program -- ending reliance on cruise ships and hotels for people sent fleeing by the Aug. 29 storm -- the toll of false starts and missed opportunities appears likely to top $1 billion and perhaps much more, according to a series of after-action studies and Department of Homeland Security reports, including one due for release today.
Again, I said that the government was spending unwisely in September.
It gets worse. FEMA is wasting money on their costliest venture - housing.
The government's costliest initiative -- $6.4 billion allocated to place storm survivors in temporary trailers and mobile homes -- has ground to a halt around New Orleans this week, in part because of widespread racial and class tensions. Residents of surrounding localities have refused to accept the makeshift communities.
[...]
Meanwhile, the trailer program consumes more than 60 percent of funds FEMA is spending on housing aid -- even though it benefits about 10 percent of the approximately 1 million households getting help, according to agency data and the Brookings Institution, which tracks recovery progress.
The article goes on to say that the rental assistance program cost 1/3 of the price of the temporary trailers - and is helping out about eight times the amount of people.
While this was a disaster on a magnitude that we haven't seen in modern times (displacing hundreds of thousands of people) you would think that there would have been some plan in place. After all,
According to a 218-page audit by the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general that was obtained by The Washington Post in advance of its scheduled release today, FEMA cited a New Orleans hurricane as a top threat in 2001 but never completed plans because of a lack of funds.
I'll just leave you with three more FEMA failures:
- FEMA spent $900 million to buy 25,000 manufactured homes and 1,300 modular homes, most of which cannot be used because agency rules say they are too big or unsafe in flood zones.
- The agency spent $632 million to subsidize hotel rooms for tens of thousands of families at an average cost of $2,400 a month, three times what it later paid families to rent two-bedroom apartments.
- The agency spent $249 million to secure 8,136 cruise-ship cabins for six months, at a cost that Inspector General Richard L. Skinner estimated at $5,100 a month per passenger. That is six times the cost of renting two-bedroom apartments.
I have to stop myself from quoting the entire article; I already quoted large portions, more than I normally do. But the vast incompetence is just staggering.
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