Imagine working on a 1,000-acre pig farm and being told by your boss to determine which pen smells worst. You now have an idea how the scores of auditors investigating some $88 billion worth of Hurricane Katrina aid are going about their jobs. No matter where they point their noses, the sight and stink of waste is unmistakable and overwhelming.

Already, authorities have established that at least $1 billion in taxpayer money has been squandered on fraudulent disaster aid since the storm devastated the Gulf Coast in August 2005. This month, the Government Accountability Office said the $1 billion estimate was "likely understated" given the Federal Emergency Management Agency's continuing inability to sniff out bogus claims for housing assistance.

Next month, investigators are expected to release the first of several audits scrutinizing more than $12 billion in contracts, and the early line has another $1 billion washed away. More than half of the cleanup contracts worth at least $500,000 were awarded without competing offers, including four no-bid agreements worth a total of $400 million. Political favoritism is rampant in the process, and FEMA's promise to rebid many of the pacts hasn't been fully honored.

"It's a combination of laziness, ineptitude and it may well be nefarious," said Clark Ervin, inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security from 2003 to 2004.

"I don't think sufficient progress has been made."

The audits should play nicely with next year's congressional hearings on the federal government's response to the monster storm. It goes without saying that wasteful spending afflicts every cubicle in the federal bureaucracy, but FEMA's botched execution of relief efforts will be especially painful to confront, given the hardships endured by so many Americans in Katrina's aftermath.

However, the investigations and hearings into wasted relief funds shouldn't be focused exclusively on the executive branch. If auditors followed their noses, they'd find an equally rank odor coming from the judiciary.

Over the past year, a handful of activist judges have ignored constitutional limits on their authority and attempted to seize control of the federal treasury. It began last December when U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval of New Orleans ordered FEMA to extend the hotel stays of thousands of Katrina evacuees into February at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. He ruled that FEMA's plan to cut off hotel subsidies on Jan. 7, 2006, ended aid too close to the holidays, and that FEMA was obligated to foot these lodging bills until the agency could process applications for additional federal assistance.

Then, just last month, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon ruled that FEMA violated the constitutional rights of thousands of evacuees by halting their housing subsidies more than a year after the disaster. He ordered FEMA to not only resume payments, but provide months worth of back payments to recipients because evacuees weren't given a clear explanation as to why they weren't getting additional checks.

"This is a legal disaster. People's rights are being denied," an irate Judge Leon said two weeks after his ruling.

In fact, the Constitution spells out no "right" to endless financial support from the government, no matter how unfortunate the circumstance.

And goodness knows no one has a "right" to clear, timely, compassionate communication from bureaucrats. A true "right" places no burden on fellow citizens or the government itself.

Thankfully, last week, a federal appeals court quashed Judge Leon's demand and allowed the temporary housing program to expire, as Congress and the president intended.

When appointed judges order the legislative and executive branches to keep writing checks, an already wasteful environment is made that much worse. In such interventions, no one is directly accountable to taxpayers.

Assuming investigators are able to clean out the filth in some programs, fresh piles will continue to plop around them. In federal spending, as on the pig farm, waste is a stinky fact of life.