‘Breathtaking’ Waste and Fraud in Hurricane Aid
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James Joyner | Tuesday, June 27, 2006 |
Today’s New York Times fronts a story entitled “‘Breathtaking’ Waste and Fraud in Hurricane Aid.”
Among the many superlatives associated with Hurricane Katrina can now be added this one: it produced one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and stupefying bureaucratic bungles in modern history, costing taxpayers up to $2 billion. A hotel owner in Sugar Land, Tex., has been charged with submitting $232,000 in bills for phantom victims. And roughly 1,100 prison inmates across the Gulf Coast apparently collected more than $10 million in rental and disaster-relief assistance. There are the bureaucrats who ordered nearly half a billion dollars worth of mobile homes that are still empty, and renovations for a shelter at a former Alabama Army base that cost about $416,000 per evacuee. And there is the Illinois woman who tried to collect federal benefits by claiming she watched her two daughters drown in the rising New Orleans waters. In fact, prosecutors say, the children did not exist.
The tally of ignoble acts linked to Hurricane Katrina, pulled together by The New York Times from government audits, criminal prosecutions and Congressional investigations, could rise because the inquiries are under way. Even in Washington, a city accustomed to government bloat, the numbers are generating amazement. “The blatant fraud, the audacity of the schemes, the scale of the waste — it is just breathtaking,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and chairwoman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Such an outcome was feared soon after Congress passed the initial hurricane relief package, as officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the American Red Cross acknowledged that their systems were overwhelmed and tried to create new ones on the fly. “We did, in fact, put into place never-before-used and untested processes,” Donna M. Dannels, acting deputy director of recovery at FEMA, told a House panel this month. “Clearly, because they were untested, they were more subject to error and fraud.”
Officials in Washington say they recognized that a certain amount of fraud or improper payments is inevitable in any major disaster, as the government’s mission is to rapidly distribute emergency aid. They typically send out excessive payments that represent 1 percent to 3 percent of the relief distributed, money they then ask people to give back. What was not understood until now was just how large these numbers could become.
Truly a shame, if entirely predictable. While some of the blame here falls on FEMA, DHS, and the administration, it’s mostly just the nature of sympathy politics. By rushing to dump billions of dollars on the problem to demonstrate that “we care” about the victims of disasters and to avoid accusations of moving too slowly, we dumped money out there without normal safeguards.
Given the nature of the disaster, it may have been entirely reasonable to take people’s word for the fact that they’d lost children, for example. But this created a climate where sleazy people with no conscience could take advantage of “free money.”
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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Its simple. Bush is bad for not helping the people fast enough and Bush is bad for helping the people to fast to prevent scams. You don't need a secret decoder ring to understand the NYT position on anything.
To me, it's just another example of how Bush's "CEO Presidency" is a sham. The administration doesn't have the kind of management structure in place which is needed to prevent fraud and corruption. It's just Bush's college buddies and campaign donors all up and down the organizational chart.
jwb,
It's more than just that... Bush has taken the old conservative plank of limited gov't and twisted it into wholesale dismantling of gov't... it's no longer a question of whether or not the gov't should do something - Bush has made it so the gov't physically can't do many things that most people would expect them to do.
So what was Clinton's excuse for screwin' up when Floyd devastated North Carolina?
More incopetence from Bush's government. But since we have a budget surplus, whats a few billion, right?
The New York Times ?
You mean that there are still people stupid enough to buy and read that TERRORIST LOVING RAG.
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