FEMA follies

Those who enjoy wielding the considerable powers of the modern central state sometimes get trapped by the myths they themselves help perpetuate.

No bureaucrat sitting in an office in Washington, D.C. -- even a functionary as powerful as the president of the United States -- can really cause your doctor to properly diagnoses your illness. No one there can really make you car run further on cheaper fuel, or help your kid learn her multiplication tables, or order the storms at sea to reverse course and cause no harm.

Though they sometimes act as though they can.

Some people even seem to believe the president should have been able to do something to stop Hurricane Katrina from devastating New Orleans -- a city below sea level, whose politicians had been warned for decades to stop diverting money from dike and levee repair.

The poor performance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency -- FEMA -- in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 has been widely cited as one of the factors that helped Republicans control of Congress in 2006.

Now, surely no one believes any federal agency could have stopped a hurricane. But when presidential candidates run around the country promising to fix everything from our medical care to our children's education, certain expectations are raised.

Today FEMA is under orders to improve its image. So the agency has turned to doing what federal bureaucrats always do best: giving away money.

"Mark Meade never thought he would need fire insurance for his Ramona, Calif., mobile home," explained The Los Angeles Times this week. "Then wildfires in San Diego County destroyed everything Meade and his wife owned, and this week he found an unlikely savior: the Federal Emergency Management Agency. ...

"Meade, 52, a disabled contractor, gives FEMA good marks. It took him and his wife ... less than a week to apply for and receive $28,800, the maximum FEMA grant available to cover both housing and other needs."

Mr. Meade got his money fast because he had no private insurance, the newspaper explains. Those who had private insurance have to wait.

Thus creating a disincentive for people to buy their own insurance, the next time. This is supposed to be a good thing?

Not to worry, though. It's just not in FEMA's nature to avoid messing up for long.

In New Orleans, back during Hurricane Katrina, the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas lost many specimens to the floodwaters. FEMA agreed to pay more than $600,000 to replace them.

But aquarium officials figured out a way to do the job for less. They sent people to the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida Keys and the Bahamas to catch some fish of appropriate types. They ended up catching 1,681 fish at a cost of a little under $100,000, saving the taxpayers a lot of money.

But now FEMA says it won't pay for the fish, because the aquarium people went out and caught the fish themselves, instead of paying higher prices to buy them on the commercial market, where they could have gotten receipts.

"FEMA does not consider it reasonable when an applicant takes excursions to collect specimens," a spokesman explained.

Ah. Now there's the old FEMA we knew and loved.