Reason #6: Our Bloated Government, Expensive and Incompetent

FEMA got a lot of bad press for the poor way it responded to Katrina. But the story of these trailers makes that controversy look downright tame.

You’d think with the explosive growth of government in the last forty years that we taxpayers would be getting more for our money. But that’s not the way it works in the upside-down world of Washington. The bigger the institutions of government get, and the more money we spend on them, the less we seem to get back in return.

Take the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). It was created in 1979 and now swallows up more than $8 billion a year. Over 2600 people work for FEMA full time, and another 4000 or so part time employees pitch in after disasters. That’s a huge workforce, with massive amounts of funding. Yet when Hurricane Katrina, the biggest natural disaster in our history, struck in 2005 the disaster management agency fell on its face. And in the years since it hasn’t done any better.

I travelled to the Gulf Coast area for business recently. One day, I was driving through Mississippi on Interstate 59 when I saw something so amazing, I had to pull over or I might crash: thousands of empty travel trailers lined up side by side in a field. It was like the biggest RV lot I’ve ever seen, except these units weren’t for sale. They were just sitting there cooking in the sun with the grass and the weeds growing up around them.

FEMA got a lot of bad press for the poor way it responded to Katrina. But the story of these trailers makes that controversy look downright tame. As it turns out, you and I - the American taxpayer - bought that entire RV graveyard I saw, plus tens of thousands of other empty trailers rotting away in different parts of the country, for almost $3 billion. And now we’re paying even more to warehouse all those decaying white elephants while dithering FEMA bureaucrats try to figure out what to do with them.

After the storms, FEMA decided it would buy 140,000 travel trailers to shelter victims who’d lost their houses. But there was one problem with the plan. In the entire country, there were less than 15,000 of these trailers in existence at the time. Of course, manufacturers were all too willing to charge top dollar to fill the last-minute order - about $20,000 per unit by most estimates, though many cost much, much more.

Unfortunately, busted budgets were just the beginning of the trailer travesty. As soon as people moved in, many of them started complaining of breathing problems, headaches, nausea and other health problems. Instead of taking these complaints seriously, FEMA dragged its feet and pretended everything was fine. But testing eventually proved that the trailers were full of formaldehyde. That’s right, the stuff that undertakers use to preserve dead bodies.

The whole story is outrageous. We’ve known for decades that the Gulf Coast would be struck by a major hurricane at some point. And yet, when the inevitable finally happened, the best FEMA could do was pay top dollar at the last minute for hundreds of thousands of toxic recreational vehicles? It’s disgraceful. But it’s par for the course now for our fat-headed government and its bloated bureaucracy. Washington limps along from crisis to crisis, wasting our tax dollars and making hasty, last minute decisions about problems that should have been planned for years in advance.

NEXT: Reason #7: The Social Security Ponzi Scheme