The Red Tape

A serious inquiry needs to be done into the terrifically inefficient, ineffective, ongoing Katrina Relief effort. We continue to not serve our duties to those in need appropriately. Today, we find out that $5.3 million worth of emergency food aid never made it to Katrina victims, even though it was staged and ready within days of landfall of the storm. It has simply sat in a warehouse because of various unfounded rules and regulations which prevented its use:

In the early days of September, as military helicopters plucked desperate New Orleanians from rooftops and Red Cross shelters swelled with the displaced, nearly 400,000 packaged meals landed on a tarmac at Little Rock Air Force Base and were whisked by tractor-trailer to Louisiana.

But most of the $5.3 million worth of food never reached the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Instead, because of fears about mad cow disease and a long-standing ban on British beef, the rations routinely consumed by British soldiers have sat stacked in a warehouse in Arkansas for more than a month.

In September, nearly 400,000 meals donated by Britain for hurricane relief arrived in Arkansas. Some were distributed, but most remain in storage. (By Mike Wintroath -- Associated Press)

Now, with some of the food set to expire in early 2006 and U.S. taxpayers spending $16,000 a month to store the meals, the State Department is quickly and quietly looking for a needy country to take them.

In a disaster recovery effort that has been widely criticized as slow, inefficient and at times wasteful, the long and costly journey of the British rations is a tale of good intentions colliding with a cumbersome bureaucracy.

No fewer than six federal agencies or departments had a role in accepting, distributing and rejecting the food. Even now, there remains a disagreement within the Bush administration over which office shipped the meals to 14 locations in Louisiana and which is responsible for paying the mounting storage fees.

[I have an idea or two where we could ship that food and at least put it to good use...]

Likewise with the Katrina housing issue: as hundreds of thousands of Americans are still completely displaced, the government is fronting the bill, at the cost of $6 million/a day. I, of course, am fine with this bill- so long as the survivors are taken care of, properly and adequately placed in locations where they can begin to reconstruct their lives. That's great. In fact, the government's self-imposed deadline for these victims will end this weekend, and many may be left out to dry something the AntiC definitely does NOT support.

But $6 million a day is a lot, considering that there have been mobile home units ready and available for weeks.

I suppose this is the grand scheme that the GOP talked up in their "Cut The Red Tape" speeches. Of course, they haven't been working on cutting the red tape. The leadership of our country, for the past two months, has had other agendas when it comes to Katrina relief.