Kevin has a chronology of FEMA's treatment, privatization, and downsizing over the past few years that's really very damning. Government has uses and cutting it has consequences. Cutting FEMA, though there may be no disasters at the moment, can aid and abet crises in the long-run. Ejecting the ill from the rolls of Medicaid, as the governor of Tennessee is, will leave catastrophically sick patients ignoring their conditions until they explode into something that'll cost far more in the long-run. Government has a purpose. When you cut it, you handicap its ability to fulfill that purpose. Too often, the right ignores an agency's mission and instead focuses on its simple existence as another arm of government, another place for bureaucracy. But when you axe that, you better have a parallel, similarly effective organization ready to pick up the slack.
This time, we didn't. This time, we needed big government. And this time, people suffered because ideology triumphed. Could FEMA have prevented this? No. Could the government of New Orleans have prevented this? No. But if FEMA's report naming a massive hurricane in New Orleans as one of the three likeliest catastrophes had been listened to, fixing the levees and creating an evacuation plan for the poor would've been priorities. But they weren't. Not for the federal government, and not for the state government. And as so often happens when government is hogtied, handicapped, and short-sighted, it was the impoverished who paid.
FEMA's other two doomsday scenarios were a terrorist attack in New York and a powerful earthquake ripping through California. Two out of three have happened. I hope my state, the Golden State, has taken notice.
