You mean, FEMA is subject to red-tape?

August 30, 2006

A little under a year ago, I swore I’d never blog about FEMA again. At least in reference to Hurricane Katrina. At the time, I honestly felt the bit was played out - the media and the blogoverse had covered it like flies on shit for the better part of way-too-long. FEMA is a government agency. Government agencies are inherently unable to allocate resources, and the more urgent the situation, the more likely it is that they will fail. There is a reason why marine snipers do not follow any chain of command. They are the chain of command. Why? Bureaucracies, always and everywhere are grossly inefficient decision-makers.

So, that rant out of the way, one year later we’re still blasting FEMA for its mismanagement of the disaster relief effort. Was anybody honestly surprised by this, in today’s Washington Post:

Anyone? Don’t waste your time reading the article, it will only infuriate you. For your reading pleasure, however, enjoy these choice tidbits (all emphases mine):

“Disasters should be difficult to declare. . . . But once you get them, FEMA should not worry about cutting costs,” said Daniel A. Craig, who stepped down in October as head of FEMA’s recovery division and is now consulting for New Orleans. “Public entities are eligible for everything they have lost due to the disaster. It is not up to FEMA to cut corners or makes sure money is saved.”

See, FEMA can’t make decisions regarding costs - it’s simply “not up to” them! Astounding. But it gets better: one spokesman for the Sewer Board says “We want to give them what they deserve but . . . make sure they are not getting more than they deserve, at some other community’s expense” Well, ignorance is bliss, when you can get someone else to pay for it. And when the costs of your ignorance, your poor decisions, your outright foolishness, are borne by others - well, its inevitable that you’ll go on making more of those decisions.

NEWS FLASH: Everything you’re getting from FEMA is coming at the expense of some other communities (read: taxpayers in safer locales) who didn’t ask to underwrite poor planning, and poor decisions, but were forced to do it anyways, thus securing the inevitability that the coastal region would make poor decisions.

Seems to me that there is an undeniably strong correlation between moral hazards and “public goods.”


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