Privatizing FEMA

Of all the attempts by conservatives to regain some post-Katrina balance, the most pernicious has to be the growing effort to use FEMA's failure to delegitimize the government's role in disaster-relief. Man, that's chutzpah. The car broke because Bush slashed its tires and now his allies are trying to convince us that the real problem lies with the whole "car" concept.

You should all use planes.

Planes fueled by tax cuts and personal responsibility.

It's a larger-scale, and significantly more cynical, deployment of the classic starve-the-beast strategy. If government has no tax revenues, it'll do a bad job. If it does a bad job, people won't like it. If people don't like government, they'll vote Republican. Replace "no tax revenues" with "incompetent leaders appointed through political patronage" and you've got this slimy little bastard.

Follow the ooze and you'll find the argument in its natural habitat -- Tony Snow's head. Snow, of course, has built a career dressing viciously dishonest statements in a fine Italian suit of exasperated sanity. Here he lauds the private sector's remarkable mobilization against Katrina and blasts FEMA's fatally flawed response, ending in a call for the complete privatization of disaster relief. In better times, this can all be dismissed, but add in the fact that some corporations really were impressive -- how often, after all, do I praise Wal-Mart? -- and the point begins to carry a certain amount of force.

You know, until you think about it a bit. Back to that Wal-Mart example, here's H. Lee Scott:

"We can't do any more than our own part. We are not the federal government. There is a portion we can do, and we can do it darn well."

So he's got a sense of a private company's limits, why don't we? Well, mostly because we figure we can just outsource the whole of disaster relief efforts. If FEMA's become sclerotic and unwieldy, give it to Halliburton. Hire a private company that doesn't do this for charitable reasons but profit. Profit means efficiency, especially when it comes to government contracts.

Of course, the evidence doesn't quite support the policy. The success of Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and others had everything to do with their preexisting retail structures and almost nothing to do with the mere fact that they have bottom lines. Having already implemented highly routinized methods for delivering goods to these areas, replacing DVD players with aid packages was a relatively minor matter. But we're not talking about deputizing a big box retailer to handle disaster relief in this country. We're talking about the creation of a private FEMA, a coordinating agency that draws up plans, directs emergency response, provides aid, and does so only when disasters hit, not through a series of preexisting, otherwise active distribution networks. Instead, their mandate is to coordinate offers of aid from Big Box Retailers, NGO's, charities, and the public sector.

So shaving off that bit of Wal-Mart-will-save-us-all fiction, what we're left with is the argument that private FEMA would be better than public FEMA. Fair enough, particularly considering public-FEMA's performance. But FEMA hasn't followed some preset evolutionary pathway to incompetence, it's been destroyed by a series of bad decisions by identifiable leaders. And that's not some Mercury-in-retrograde happenstance, we know who did it, we know why they did it, and we know how they did it. If this were a game of Clue, the winning formula would be Mr. Bush in the Oval Office with the campaign contributor. And we want to let this guy completely overhaul the way we run disaster response in this country? Brilliant! Next up, Michael Jackson is deputized to make your child's daycare more like Neverland!

What, you're not against ferris wheels, are you?

This is a pretty constant conservative fallacy when it comes to privatization. The market may encourage efficiency, but only if it works like a market. When politicians run the bidding, that's never assured. If you let corrupt pols privatize, the privatization will be corrupt. And if they have a tendency to install campaign cronies in positions of power, there's no reason to expect they won't award contracts in exactly the same manner. So forgive me if I don't quite see the efficiency gain in trading an incompetent individual who helped on the campaign for an unqualified corporation that donated to the campaign. Halliburton's "misplaced" how many billions in Iraq now?

Moreover, nothing, nothing is inherently inefficient about the public sector. Some corporations turn out to be corrupt, like Enron, or inefficient, like any number of bankrupted, bloated brands, and some government agencies do the same. But some don't. Here's Bush talking about one of them:

You know, as governor, one of the things you have to deal with is catastrophe. I can remember the fires that swept Parker County, Texas. I remember the floods that swept our state. I remember going down to Del Rio, Texas. I have to pay the administration a compliment. James Lee Witt of FEMA has done a really good job of working with governors during times of crisis.

FEMA did not set a self-directed course towards disaster. A career professional who made it a model agency was replaced with a political crony who rendered it a useless mess. Now conservatives are crying out that Katrina has proved the public sector inefficient, and we should give the same leader who weakened FEMA the opportunity to award private contracts for future disaster-relief. We should trade political patronage for crony capitalism.

Bush's decisions transformed a remarkably efficient government agency into a fatally incompetent one, so conservatives want to let him do it a second time. It's completely insane. This isn't a private vs. public debate -- contrast Clinton's FEMA with Bush's version to see that. But the right would much prefer that it was. Democrats should make sure voters understand that Bush took a superb organization and destroyed it by handing control to a politically-connected incompetent. Republicans who demand we let him do it a second time in a less reversible manner should be laughed out of the room.