As Michael Brown resigned his post as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Monday following a relentless beating in the press for his mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina relief and rescue efforts, details on FEMA's past missteps began emerging.

Possibly the most egregious of these largely under-reported fiascos was the revelation that FEMA made 31 million dollars in questionable payments to residents of Florida's Miami-Dade County for damage from Hurricane Frances in September 2004, even though the storm caused only minimal damage in that area.

J. Robert Hunter, director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America, who was a top federal flood-insurance official in the 1970s and 1980s, said that the Frances overpayments "are questionable given the timing of the election and Florida's importance" as a battleground state. Hunter was Texas insurance commissioner in the 1990s under then-Gov. Ann W. Richards, a Democrat.

The Davis-Bacon Act prohibits the federal government from undercutting prevailing wages in the construction industry in areas where the federal government is contracting for work. The administration is required to ensure that its contracts establish minimum wages for workers that comport with the prevailing wage of the area. The White House invoked the act's exemption for national emergencies.

The irony here is that the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was compounded by poverty and low wages -- factors that kept many from evacuating in time. Now the Bush administration is empowering itself to pay substandard wages for the reconstruction effort.

Posted by Robert Shull, 06:09:58 PM



Americans Demand Focus on Domestic Policy
USA Today is reporting the results of the latest Pew poll, in which a majority expresses its desire for a renewed focus on domestic policy:

More than half of Americans now say it is more important for the president to focus on domestic policy — the first time since Sept. 11, 2001 that domestic matters have been viewed as a higher priority than the war on terrorism in polling by the Pew Research Center.

Two-thirds said the president could have done more to get relief efforts going quickly, according to the survey.

The slow-moving response to the hurricane appears to have shaken American confidence in the government's ability to deal with a major disaster. Four in 10 said the response to the hurricane has made them less confident about the government's ability to handle a major terrorist attack.

Almost six in 10 in the Pew poll, 58%, say they have felt depressed because of what's happened along the Gulf Coast. Pew polling indicates that at no point during the Iraq war has that high a percentage of people said they were depressed because of the war.

First, a recap of PART itself: PART is supposed to be a tool for performance measurement that, theoretically, generates data on program effectiveness that can then be fed back into program management reforms and budget decisions. In actuality, PART is a simplistic one-size-fits-all process that provides a technical veneer for very political decisions. In addition to creating fine-sounding rhetorics of results to justify slash-and-burn budget decisions, PART is a vehicle for sending signals to program managers to make policy adjustments that receive the White House seal of approval (whether or not those decisions are actually authorized by the law governing a program). Learn more with this introductory issue brief.

Check out the FY05 and FY06 PART assessments for the Army Corps of Engineers. Relevant programs PARTed:

• Coastal Storm Damage Reduction Program: praised for using cost-benefit analysis in prioritizing construction projects. As John Woodley, Jr., Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works testified, the Corps “had numerous projects ongoing and insufficient funding to continue all of our projects at an efficient level” [in other words, too little funding to meet all the pressing needs] and therefore asked for construction funds “to be strictly prioritized by remaining cost to remaining benefit, and that is a measure that takes into account the benefits that are yet to be gained from a project compared to the remaining costs that are needed to be invested to reap those benefits.” [Testimony available on Westlaw at 2005 WL 82731 (F.D.C.H.).] We need more details about these cost-benefit analyses — after all, as one TV commentator has observed, “"If this [level of disaster] were to happen in California, okay, fine. There's a number of incentives to sort of rebuild that area. Imagine trying to do that in rural Mississippi.” Or in any other poor area where the benefits of damage reduction could count for less than damage reduction in a more prized coastal area. The program was rated as “Results Not Demonstrated” — a grade that OMB explains officially as an indeterminate score, meaning that there is insufficient information upon which to assess program results, but that the White House often invokes as meaning failure to produce results. The program was slated for successive budget cuts in the FY04, 05, and 06 budgets.
• Emergency Management Program: The White House knew that the program was underfunded and relied excessively on supplemental funding, which forced the Corps to redirect funds from other projects until supplemental funds came through. Just the same, the White House asked for a dramatic budget cut for FY06.
• Flood Damage Reduction Program: rated “Results Not Demonstrated.” One place the program lost points on its PART assessment was the question, “Is the program optimally designed to address the interest, problem or need?” OMB’s response: no, because — based on the OMB bean counter’s opinion, not any real evidence — the Corps “should put more emphasis on non-structural solutions and avoid designing projects to provide 100-year protection where it may not be economically feasible.” Another “failure”: “When formulating proposed investments, the Corps assumes schedules that do not reflect likely funding constraints. On the bright side, the budget examiner noted, “Recently, the Corps has adopted a performance measure where it compares the estimated costs of completed projects with the projected benefits to ensure that the project’s benefit cost ratio is maintained.”