When you can’t manage situations, then you must throw money at it. That seems to be the Republican way of dealing things and it causes a big mess and a bigger burden for the U.S. tax payer:
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.
So what has this lack of oversight on the part of our government cost us? Take your blood pressure medicine then read on:
The estimate of up to $2 billion in fraud and waste represents nearly 11 percent of the $19 billion spent by FEMA on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as of mid-June, or about 6 percent of total money that has been obligated.
Congress has said FEMA is broken, as well as the media and a vast number of Americans. Of course old “stay the course” Bush doesn’t feel that way. Well here is another perfect example of just how broken FEMA is. Another part of our government destroyed by this administration and we are left to clean up the mess. Incompetence does not even begin to describe it.