Weather ruins plans, and everybody has a story.
Last summer, floods in Iowa ruined a lot of corn in a world where food shortages are occurring, resulting in higher sustenance costs.
A few years back, a few people in a town called New Orleans had their homes and businesses destroyed by a storm called Katrina.
To a lesser degree, the past few weeks have brought flooding to western Washington and Oregon.
As I sat watching the news on Seattle’s local television station, I repeatedly ran across an acronym that is very commonly used as a pejorative: FEMA.
Following Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s slow and uncoordinated efforts were criticized harshly. As a result, Kanye West famously said that President Bush doesn’t care about black people. FEMA soon overcame Monica Lewinsky as the favorite American governmental joke.
But our derogatory jesting was misdirected. FEMA wasn’t the problem; it was (and still is) a symptom of the bureaucratic disease. It is the cheap materials used to build the edifice, not the crew who constructed it.
FEMA resides under the control of the Department of Homeland Security. This might be a relevant placement if the U.S. were the target of large-scale terror attacks more often than twice a century, but nobody would hope for that simply to justify the agency’s existence.
The new head of DHS is our former governor, Janet Napolitano. This attests to FEMA’s irrelevance, as the last emergency the state of Arizona faced that needed federal aid was, um … probably whatever made the Hohokam disappear.
Being the dust that got swept under the mat of DHS is one of the signs that FEMA shouldn’t even exist, but how would things change if — in an act of budgetary discipline that many politicians pretend to have, but rarely see through — FEMA were eliminated?
By simply existing, FEMA is encouraging the ignorance of U.S. citizens. With the imminence of the agency’s intervention into disasters, insurance companies offer lower premiums in high-risk areas — like flood plains or those that are often hurricane-riddled — because they are no longer fully responsible for picking up the tab on the damages; FEMA will help, using taxpayer money. Because insurance payments will be lower, individuals and companies will be more likely to build in those areas, even though the chances their property will be damaged or destroyed are higher.
If FEMA disappears, insurance in these areas will rise. The result? People don’t play stupid, and live in safer places. If the government spends less money by eliminating an irrelevant and ignored institution, insurance costs will more honestly and accurately assess risk, and people will lose their homes and businesses less often. The Red Cross and similar institutions can provide the supplies needed by victims.
Agencies like FEMA are redundant. Without them, public welfare will increase. With them, we have the emergency response equivalent of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae’s mortgage investment practices.
Tell Ryan how much you love FEMA at ryan.oneal@asu.edu.
