Coyote Blog

It frustrates me some when the government's Katrina response is cited as an example of government failure.  This implies that the government should perform better, but just didn't in this particular case because of some process or personnel problem.  But the government's Katrina response was not the government failing, but the government doing exactly what it always does.  Governments of all types are hard-wired to produce the mess we saw.  And it was a mess, as Ralph Reiland summarizes a recent NY Times article:

• An estimated 1,100 prison inmates across the Gulf Coast collected in excess
  of $10 million in rental assistance and disaster-relief money. Crime pays! FEMA,
  in addition, distributed millions of tax dollars to people who used names and
  Social Security numbers belonging to state and federal prisoners.
• A hotel owner in Sugar Land, Texas, has been charged with submitting
  $232,000 in invoices for evacuees who allegedly never stayed at his hotel,
  billing FEMA for purportedly empty rooms or rooms occupied by paying guests or
  hotel employees.
• An Illinois woman who was living in Illinois at the time of the storm sought
  relief benefits by claiming she had watched her two daughters drown in the flood
  waters of New Orleans. The children never existed.
• A Department of Labor employee in Louisiana, appropriately named Wayne
  Lawless, has been charged with handing out nearly 100 falsified disaster
  unemployment benefit cards in exchange for kickbacks of up to $300 per card.
  
• In New Orleans, two FEMA officials have pleaded guilty to pocketing $20,000
  in bribes in exchange for inflating the count on the number of meals a
  contractor was serving to relief workers.
• With the $2,000 debit cards distributed by FEMA for disaster relief, an
  estimated 5,000 people have double dipped, receiving both the $2,000 plastic
  card and a second $2,000 by check or electronically.
• Two men, one a representative of the Army Corps of Engineers, have pleaded
  guilty to taking kickbacks in exchange for approving payments for removal of
  nonexistent loads of hurricane debris. In contrast, with loads of debris that
  were not nonexistent, a councilman in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, has been
  charged with attempting to extort $100,000 from a debris-removal contractor.
  
• One creative scam artist is charged with collecting 26 federal disaster
  relief checks totaling $139,000 by using 13 Social Security numbers and fake
  claims of damage at bogus addresses. Others collected and pocketed hurricane
  relief donations by posing as Red Cross workers.
  All told, what the above
  represents is "one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and
  stupefying bureaucratic bungles in modern history," reports the Times, "costing
  taxpayers up to $2 billion."

Note that this isn't a unique failure - this story can be written about any government handout program.  And this wasn't a case of FEMA moving too fast without restraints when everyone around it was signaling caution - in fact just the opposite.  Everyone on the sidelines at the time was criticizing FEMA for being too slow in handing out money willy-nilly.

One of the problems never discussed very often is that increasingly, the government has insisted on an exclusive monopoly position for itself in providing disaster assistance.  In effect, past disaster assistance was provided by people you never see or hear about, private people taking private action.  In Katrina, the government worked hard to shut most of these people out.  So, in this sense, Katrina was probably a worse response than in other disasters because the bottom-up, thousands-of-people-helping-out response was not allowed.  FEMA, under pressure from both sides of the aisle, increasingly take the Al Haig "I'm in charge here" approach, much to everyone's detriment. 
Unfortunately, most analyses of Katrina are saying the government did not do enough.  I think it did too much.