President Obama has used his executive power in many ways to expand the role of government. But there’s one area that stands out: Obama’s frequent and repeated use of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to issue emergency and disaster declarations. Heritage’s Matt Mayer reports that Obama “eviscerated the record books by issuing 243 declarations in 2011,” continuing an alarming pattern that begin under President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush. Mayer says FEMA has become a “political pork-barrel spending agency.” The trend is illustrated in this week’s chart, which …
Listening to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) or reading The New York Times yesterday gave the impression that disaster relief victims were suffering from a lack of government aid. “Without additional funding,” Reid warned, “thousands of people who have lost literally everything they owned will be forced to go without food and shelter.” The New York Times, reporting from Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, noted, “Uprooted and desolate, hard-working people in this part of the country expect a bit more from their government.” Yesterday, with Reid on the brink of forcing a government …
The United States is ready for the next Hurricane Katrina according to Admiral Thad Allen, the former director of the FEMA response effort in New Orleans. In an article put out by Bloomberg, Allen was quoted saying “there is nothing right now that inhibits an effective response.” However others seem to disagree. Craig Fugate, director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, and Heritage’s Dr. James Carafano see that more still needs to be done. Policies and procedures still need to be reassessed and improved, plus Congressional meddling and their practices …
Disaster management is over-federalized. This chart from a recent Heritage Backgrounder, The Local Role in Disaster Response: Lessons from Katrina and the California Wildfires, makes it abundantly clear. With the exception of the Johnson and Reagan administrations, the number of federal disaster declarations has steadily and dramatically grown. By the end of President Bush’s second term, the average yearly declarations for this administration will be at 130 –nearly a 50 percent increase from the Clinton administration’s yearly average of 88. In other words, FEMA takes on a new declaration every 3 days. …
