OT FEMA rant (Was: Re: shame on fema)

[Siri Amrit Kaur]

On Friday 09 September 2005 12:20 am Alan Dayley kindly wrote:
> FEMA is a huge agency, most of whose workers are no where near the
> catastrophe or the victims.  If the money the feds are/will be
> paying out to the victims were simply passed down to the smallest
> possible entity (Fed->State->County->City) and let the people
> talking to the victim decide what recovery funds should be
> disbursed then the address and phone number of the victim is less
> important because the guy making the decision is already talking to
> the victim

I don't remember where I read it last week, but I read that FEMA used 
to be only about 2,500 people with a small administration. Not a huge 
government agency when you look at some of the others. Before it got 
absorbed into the Dept of Homeland (In)Security, field officers could 
make a lot of decisions on the spot, such as requesting specific FEMA 
people they knew to have certain skills to come and help. Now, since 
losing their autonomy, these requests have to go through "channels" 
and field agents must travel far out of their way to be "processed" 
before being allowed to go where they're needed. They sometimes lose 
a day or more in "processing" before they can get to where they're 
needed.

Almost all government programs would be more efficient if the monies 
and decisions could be kept on the local level. That's why I'm a 
Libertarian. By some measures, up to 80% of tax dollars are lost in 
layers of federal bureaucracy. Flocks of birds "flock" not because of 
an order to wheel right or left coming from the lead bird. They wheel 
through the air in unison because each bird is conscious of its' 
immediate neighbors on either side of it. The Cathedral and Bazaar 
analogy is right on target...

Siri Amrit