Katrina fraud and waste is almost as staggering as hurricane
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.No kidding. One of the reasons that they were put in place was the hysteria of liberals over getting relief funds to "victims." With so many real victims it was impossible to adequately screen them and it is not surprising that many phony victims took advantage. Hopefully they can be prosecuted, ubt recovery of stolen funds is unlikely. As for the FEMA trailers that are racking up storage fees, why not sell them and generate some cash for them and save the storage dollars?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."
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Conservatives sure are incompetent. I don't think they could be competent with an automatic competency machine on the competent-est day of the year.
ReplyDeleteIt appears some liberals want to swap insults on this post. OK, liberals are so incompetent they lost the war on poverty and turned it into a quagmire.
ReplyDeleteHowever future comments will be limited to the substance of the question of whether the caterwalling of the libs in the face of the problems faced by evacuees forced FEMA to provide services and funds to people who should not have received them.
What a load of horseshit. Got any evidence that it was the "caterwalling of liberals" that lead to a poorly-thought-through free money giveaway? You're a conservative, so I suppose you don't even know what evidence is.
ReplyDeleteAs for those FEMA trailers, here's a radical idea: Why not use them to house the tens of thousands of still homeless Katrina victims (note: lack of quotes indicates lack of irony). But then what would I know? I'm just a New Orleanian.
Based on comments like Robs I would say that liberals are still caterwalling and some are potty mouthed. I should have also added the atrocious reporting by the media of the events that amplified the caterwalling with bogus stories about conditions inthe city which wound up further delaying the relief effort. And, then there was the terrific efforts of state and local authorities, shose failures made the federal governments efforts more difficult. It is really strange that Florida, Mississippi and Texas handle hurricanes so much better.
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