Once-Rare Response Is Now Routine and Overused

[Valin]

NY Times:

 

James Pethokoukis

10/30/12

 

A superstorm requires supersmart government. But making wise decisions from a distance is hard. Economists call this the problem of local knowledge. The information needed for making rational plans is distributed among many actors, and it is extremely difficult for a far-off, centralized authority to access it. The devil really is in the details. (This is why the price system, which aggregates all that dispersed insight, is more economically efficient than a command-and-control system.)

 

So emergency and disaster response should be, as much as possible, pushed down to the state and local level. A national effort should be reserved for truly catastrophic events. Indeed this preference for "local first, national second" can be found in the legislation authorizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

 

But just the opposite has been happening in recent decades. There were, according to a Heritage Foundation analysis, 28 FEMA declarations a year during the Reagan administration, 44 during Bush I, 90 during Clinton, 130 during Bush II, and 153 so far during Obama's term. The result is federal emergency response effort stretched thin in its capabilities to deal with major disasters.

 

(Snip)

[Argyle58]

FEMA has achieved a unique status as a government institution. It has at once attained entitlement stature, while at the same time has become a tool used to reward or punish various communities for their voting records, the latter primarily at the hand of Democrat administrations.

 

The political aspect of FEMA has been remarked upon several times here in TRR when no other reason could be found for lack of response to areas like Texas, North Carolina and Tennessee, where wide spread property damage had been done by wildfire, flooding and winter storms. The easiest contrast to be made is the difference in response to wildfires in Texas and Colorado over a two year span. Texas residents suffered massive losses to property in scores of communities during the 2010 wildfires there, but received no help from FEMA. A single fire in the state of Colorado in 2012, however, resulted in a massive FEMA response.

 

The entitlement aspect of FEMA, however, has had little said about it, but is a trend that I first noticed after the Alfred P. Murrah bombing in Oklahoma City. FEMA's charter provides for it to provide emergency relief in the way restoration of necessary basic needs, either through repair and replacement, or relocation. During this process in the aftermath of the bombing, residents of the Regency Towers apartment building that was severely damaged, most of whom had failed to secure renters insurance, began to complain that FEMA was not replacing their personal electronics, furniture and other high end residential acquisitions. FEMA eventually acquiesced, and the trend for this type of consumer relief became more prevalent, over the basic humanitarian aid for which FEMA was originally set up to provide.

 

An interesting side story as to the political nature of FEMA in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing and one man's ability to change government policy. Two of the oldest churches in the city, First Methodist and St. Joseph's Catholic Cathedral, both received massive damage to their buildings from the blast, both being within three blocks of the Murrah building. Both churches were initially assistance from FEMA because, in the Clinton Administration's view, the churches "did not provide a necessary community function". Rev. Nick Harris of the First Methodist Church wrote a two page editorial for the Daily Oklahoman about this policy, which was subsequently picked up by newspapers across the country and in 40 countries around the world. The resulting embarrassment caused the Clinton administration to change its secular policies regarding houses of worship.