FEMA - Your tax dollars at work

Here are two stories illustrating the incomprehensible bureaucratic monstrosity that is FEMA:

First, Drudge linked to this bizarre story from the UK Mirror Online:

HUNDREDS of tons of British food aid shipped to America for starving Hurricane Katrina survivors is to be burned.

US red tape is stopping it from reaching hungry evacuees.

Instead tons of the badly needed Nato ration packs, the same as those eaten by British troops in Iraq, has been condemned as unfit for human consumption.

... The food, which cost British taxpayers millions, is sitting idle in a huge warehouse after the Food and Drug Agency recalled it when it had already left to be distributed.

Scores of lorries headed back to a warehouse in Little Rock, Arkansas, to dump it at an FDA incineration plant.

The Ministry of Defence in London said last night that 400,000 operational ration packs had been shipped to the US.

But officials blamed the US Department of Agriculture, which impounded the shipment under regulations relating to the import and export of meat.

The aid worker, who would not be named, said: "This is the most appalling act of sickening senselessness while people starve.

"The FDA has recalled aid from Britain because it has been condemned as unfit for human consumption, despite the fact that these are Nato approved rations of exactly the same type fed to British soldiers in Iraq.

Even if this is an FDA screw up, isn't it FEMA's responsibility to coordinate the delivery and distribution of supplies to devistated areas?  If there are problems with supplies getting to where they are needed, FEMA ought to be able to step in, correct government snafus, and avoid utterly embarassing episodes like this one.

And providing us with a great example of how an undeniably large portion of the $200 billion earmarked for Federal hurricane relief and rebuilding efforts will probably be spent, Michelle Malkin links to this story:

The federal government is diverting hundreds of truckloads of bagged ice cubes from the Gulf Coast hurricane relief effort to cold storage in Portland and other cities.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency says it has more ice than it can use in the hurricane zone and wants to keep it in storage for use in a future emergency. But critics, including some truck drivers who have been paid $800 a day while hauling the same loads for a week or more, say the process seems like a waste of taxpayers' money.

"The $9,000 they're paying me to move this load should have gone to some family down there," said Loren Reeves, who hauled his load of ice from Long Island, N.Y., to Alabama before being sent to Maine. "There is definitely millions being wasted that could go to people who need it.

In my online research into FEMA and its associated problems, many of which, incidentally, far pre-date the current Bush administration, I ran across an interesting 1995 article first published in the Washington Monthly.  The article concerns the reforms that the Clinton administration emplaced within FEMA in the wake of Hurricane Andrew.  But I was struck by this paragraph:

One of the most maddening problems with FEMA, the critics said, was the constant bureaucratic delay. FEMA workers would routinely hold up vital aid requests because the proper forms were not filled out or certain signatures had not been included. "If we had asked for a certain resource this way we could have gotten it," said Kate Hale, director of the Dade County Emergency Services of her experience after Hurricane Andrew, "but FEMA would say that we hadn't framed the question properly.... FEMA's employees appeared to be terrified at making a mistake, so they'd rather do nothing than make a mistake because a mistake could cost them their career."

Apparently the more things change, the more they stay the same.  As much as I recognize the need for better preparedness and disaster relief efforts by our government, the pragmatist in me understands that large bureaucracies simply can't get the job done. 

It's too bad that virtually no one in the government cares more about the needs of others than about their own cushy jobs.

UPDATE:  A few alert bloggers have noted (and a Google news search seems to confirm) that no one except for the Mirror is carrying the food incineration story, and that no one else has independently confirmed it.  But my point still holds - if FEMA was on top of things, such a story could easily be debunked by federal officials if it wasn't true.