An Ounce of Prevention

Natural disasters don't care what your politics are and no one generally is in favor of them.

Unfortunately, some will profit from them and the urgency chaos and speed involved end up leading sometimes to rampant fraud and abuse.

This is why it is important to have the structures in place that can respond to any such disasters quickly and efficiently.

Of course human nature being what it is the funding follows the disaster, and the organizations that respond whether Governmental or Private get energized by the actual disaster.

It is nearly impossible in this day and age to get the parties and the public to agree on much.

However, I do think everybody would agree that the Government should be as efficient as humanly possible.

Of course humanly possible means it wont be perfect.

The Government employs a lot of people, and since they are people they range across the spectrum.

You can find one or more of them abusing their position, but that is simply people acting badly.

In some ways the Government management, is more concerned about their political bosses than about running an efficient organization.

Of course there have been lots of initiatives to remove politics from the executive departments but clearly since they are all staffed at the top levels by political appointees it's hard to do.

Now obviously priorities change and departments need to be responsive, but if you change the CEO and all the senior executives at a corporation overnight, the stock would likely suffer because its too disruptive.

We do that to our executive departments every so many years depending on election results.

When you wonder about the inefficiency of Government, I think this accounts for a lot of it.

An organization like FEMA should have mandated goals and sufficient funding to accomplish them.

Its not really a political thing.