Millions in Katrina aid squandered: a debit card for $450 tattoo
Millions of Katrina aid wasted, review finds: $438 a night paid for New York hotel rooms
Audits: Millions of dollars in Katrina aid wasted
Response to Katrina Was ‘Unacceptable,’ Chertoff Says
WASHINGTON (AP) - The government squandered millions of dollars in Katrina disaster aid, including handing $2,000 debit cards to people who gave phony Social Security numbers and used the money for such items as a $450 tattoo, auditors said Monday. Federal money also paid for $375-a-day beachfront condos and 10,777 trailers that were stuck in mud and unusable.
Gee, whodathunkit? The federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina was fraught with waste, inefficiency, fraud, and just plain lunacy. What a shock, eh?
In fairness, given the size of the disaster that was Katrina and it’s aftermath, a reasonable person would expect there to be some inefficiency and waste. There is simply no way that a bureacracy could handle the onslaught of people and voluminous demand for services that occurred in the weeks and month following the storm. Of course, a reasonable person would also expect that systems would be in place to speed the disaster response and help ensure at least a modicum of accountability. Instead, what we got was a system completely out of control, unprepared for anything resembling a worst-case scenario, and ill-equipped to respond in anything close to a fair, rapid, and efficient manner.
Michael Brown was the early scapegoat, sacrificed on the altar of public opinion when it became clear that the public wanted someone to pay for the ineptitude displayed by FEMA in particular and the federal government generally. From a cursor glance at the facts in the reports, though, sacrificing Brown should only be the beginning. How many of us would (deservedly) be out of a job if we took care of business in such a shoddy, careless manner? And this doesn’t even address the billions of dollars that have been wasted and in some cases unaccounted for.
Two reports released by the Government Accountability Office and the Homeland Security Department’s office of inspector general detail a series of accounting flaws, fraud or mismanagement in their initial review of how $85 billion in federal aid is being spent.
The two audits found that up to 900,000 of the 2.5 million applicants who received aid under FEMA’s emergency cash assistance program — which included the $2,000 debit cards given to evacuees — were based on duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers, or false addresses and names.
Thousands of additional dollars appear to have been squandered on hotel rooms for evacuees that were paid at retail rather than the contractor’s lower estimated cost. They included $438 rooms in New York City and beachfront condominiums in Panama City, Florida, at $375 a night, according to the audits.
The two audits were released by the Senate Homeland Security Committee as the panel wrapped up its investigation into the federal government’s preparation and response to the disaster.
“FEMA has a substantial challenge in balancing the need to get the money out quickly to those who are actually in need and sustaining public confidence in disaster programs by taking all possible steps to minimize fraud and abuse,” the GAO audit by Gregory Kutz states.
Indeed. In order to do this, though, how do you identify and fix the problems with the federal government’s disaster response system. There are some in Congress who are demanding the head of DHS director Nicholas Chertoff, and while that might be a good start, the problems are not necessarily the creation or responsibility of one person. Yes, Chertoff may be an inept political hack ill-equipped to run a department of the size and scope of Homeland Security. Even so, I really think that the problems runs much deeper than any one individual. The clusterf—k that was FEMA’s response to Katrina is representative of a culture ill-equipped to do what it is charged with doing= managing disasters. Calling for someone’s head on a platter is all well and good, but until the deeper problems are addressed, nothing will change, and this silliness with continue with the next major natural disaster- and there WILL be one, and likely soon.
Your tax dollars at work? Not hardly.
WE DESERVE BETTER.
