In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Congress launched a bipartisan investigation into how the Bush administration’s response had fallen so fatally short. That probe found, among other things, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had neglected to line up potential contractors in preparation for a major natural disaster — an oversight that led FEMA to rely on wasteful, fraudulent, or inefficient partners once the levees broke.
Now, some on Capitol Hill are beginning to suspect that FEMA made the same error under Trump, in the run-up to last year’s devastating hurricane season. Cause for such concerns isn’t hard to find. In November, the
Associated Press revealed that the agency paid a single firm $30 million for emergency tarps and plastic sheeting — none of which was ever delivered.
And on Tuesday, the New York
Times reported that FEMA handed off responsibility for providing Puerto Rico with much of its emergency food aid to “Tiffany Brown, an Atlanta entrepreneur with no experience in large-scale disaster relief and at least five canceled government contracts in her past.” The agency struck a $156 million contract with Brown, which required her to deliver 30 million meals to hungry Puerto Ricans.
Mistakes ensued:
Ms. Brown, who is adept at navigating the federal contracting system, hired a wedding caterer in Atlanta with a staff of 11 to freeze-dry wild mushrooms and rice, chicken and rice, and vegetable soup. She found a nonprofit in Texas that had shipped food aid overseas and domestically, including to a Houston food bank after Hurricane Harvey.
By the time 18.5 million meals were due, Tribute had delivered only 50,000. And FEMA inspectors discovered a problem: The food had been packaged separately from the pouches used to heat them. FEMA’s solicitation required “self-heating meals.”
…FEMA insists no Puerto Ricans missed a meal as a result of the failed agreement with Tribute. FEMA relied on other suppliers that provided “ample” food and water for distribution, said William Booher, an agency spokesman.
But there is little doubt that in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans struggled with access to food. The storm
shut down ports on an island that imports about 85 percent of its food supply. Farms
were flattened. Supermarkets lost electricity and could not find diesel to run their generators. The stores that opened using generator power could not offer much from their understocked shelves.
This revelation about FEMA’s less-than-stellar taste in contractors is only the latest testament to the
gross negligence of the Trump administration’s response to Puerto Rico’s hurricane crisis — a negligence that predates the crisis itself. Days before Hurricane Maria made landfall, the White House learned that a Category 4 storm was likely to hit the island, and that the territory’s electrical grid was unlikely to survive such an onslaught.
