Federal emergency, unmanaged

What do you do when the Federal Emergency Management Agency is itself an unmanaged federal emergency?

Weaknesses in FEMA's response system during Hurricane Katrina were just one symptom of major management challenges at the Homeland Security Department, an internal report issued Wednesday concludes.

The report by the department's inspector general also questions Homeland Security's ability to properly oversee billions of dollars worth of contracts it awards annually.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, an arm of the Homeland Security Department, was singled out as a top concern by investigators who pointed to the agency's "overburdened resources and infrastructure" in dealing with the double-whammy of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Investigators found that several key FEMA programs — distributing aid to disaster victims, emergency response information systems, modernizing flood maps and managing contracts and grants — remain inadequate.

Moreover, "when one considers that FEMA's programs are largely administered through grants and contracts, the circumstances created by hurricanes Katrina and Rita provide an unprecedented opportunity for fraud, waste and abuse," the report found.

In that last sentence lies the key: Privatization of such matters is a mistake because when private interests are involved, public interests become secondary. Using private interests guarantees that doing something cheaply will be more important that doing it right. And when oversight of private interests is handled as poorly as it is in FEMA, abuse will be rampant.

And I'm not just talking about skimming a few bucks from the public trough -- that's pretty much a given. The pursuit of profits can take more repugnant forms, such as lobbyists for defense contractors opposing provisions of a defense department proposal prohibiting defense contractor involvement in human trafficking for forced prostitution and labor, as documented here.

Response to federal emergencies is too important to be left to profiteers and agencies incapable of providing effective oversight. So is health care, by the way, but our elected officials will have to be dragged screaming to a viable solution for that. Right now they're too busy maintaining a role for profiteers, also known as "insurance companies" or "health administrators," in an area where they don't belong. Of course, the only health they're interested in protecting is that of their bottom line.

Some things must be handled by the public sector to eliminate the pursuit of profits and therefore the potential for abuse. The free market, regardless of what Republicans and right-wing think tankers would have you believe, is concerned with only one thing: profits.