WHITE HOUSE KATRINA FAILURES CONTINUE

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Audits: Millions of dollars in Katrina aid wasted

In its rush to provide Katrina disaster aid, the Federal Emergency Management Agency wasted millions of dollars and overpaid for hotel rooms, including $438-a-day lodging in New York City, government investigators said today.

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.

And

Sen. Susan Collins, who chairs the committee, decried the findings, noting that a series of audits and hearings after hurricanes in Florida in 2004 highlighted similar accounting problems and had called on then-FEMA director Michael Brown to make immediate changes.

"The problem, once again, is that FEMA failed to prepare for the very type of disaster that happens every year," said Collins, R-Maine. "This 'pay first, ask questions later' approach has been an invitation to unscrupulous behavior."

More here.

And from the New York Times courtesy of Eschaton:

White House Knew of Levee's Failure on Night of Storm

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.

But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.

And

Representative Thomas M. Davis III, Republican of Virginia, chairman of the special House committee investigating the hurricane response, said the only government agency that performed well was the National Weather Service, which correctly predicted the force of the storm. But no one heeded the message, he said.

"The president is still at his ranch, the vice president is still fly-fishing in Wyoming, the president's chief of staff is in Maine," Mr. Davis said. "In retrospect, don't you think it would have been better to pull together? They should have had better leadership. It is disengagement."

One of the greatest mysteries for both the House and Senate committees has been why it took so long, even after Mr. Bahamonde filed his urgent report on the Monday the storm hit, for federal officials to appreciate that the levee had broken and that New Orleans was flooding.

And

The day before the hurricane made landfall, the Homeland Security Department issued a report predicting that it could lead to a levee breach that could submerge New Orleans for months and leave 100,000 people stranded. Yet despite these warnings, state, federal and local officials acknowledged to investigators that there was no coordinated effort before the storm arrived to evacuate nursing homes and hospitals or others in the urban population without cars.

More here.

Apart from Federal Katrina failures, what these two stories have in common is that the White House fully knew about potential problems well before they happened. In the case of FEMA relief money mismanagement, they had over a year to correct their earlier mistakes, but did nothing. In the case of the levee breaches, they knew it could happen, but were unprepared, and even though they were well informed about it when it actually came to pass, they did nothing. At least, nothing at first. It took about three days of freak-out televison reporting, even from Fox, to shake Bush's people out of their bizarre trance. Even then, their reaction was more about covering up their failure than it was about helping New Orleans.

This kind of incompetence doesn't just happen. It's pretty clear that Bush's White House really doesn't take governing seriously. After a quarter century of Republican sloganeering about such concepts as "government is the problem" and "tax relief" for the wealthy, the GOP seems to be more concerned with dismantling the federal government and handing over the pieces to wealthy donors than it is with the general welfare of the nation. Most people think that, at least, Bush's heart is in the right place, if not his head, but they're quite wrong: the problems of the nation simply don't matter to him.

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