http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/06/11/fema.gi...index.html

To summarize, FEMA just gave away $85 million dollars in household goods intended for Katrina victims, goods which had been gathering dust in a warehouse for two years. Though all of the states were offered the goods, Louisiana refused. No offers were made to local non-profits, even those FEMA is still refering people to for housing assistance. The director of the Louisiana Federal Property Assistance Agency in Baton Rouge was unaware that Katrina victims still had a need for the household supplies.

I'm not a fan of governmental solutions and this is a prime example of why. Katrina & its aftermath has been nothing but an absolute debacle at all levels of government. It's sad that they still can't figure out how to get goods to the people who need them, even after all this time.

To reinforce the point, it is pretty much beyond dispute that the most effective agencies in providing aid have been private charities, best of all churches.

I'm not sure that I find this to be proof positive of the inability of government to deal with a problem as much as I find it to be an indictment of our unreadiness to deal with this kind of situation. Given what happened, I'm not sure exactly how the responses could have gone much better with the resources available. Certainly, Ray Nagin could have used the hundreds of parked school buses to get people out ahead of the storm, but that's really about it. Expecting much more than we got in the face of what happened is unfortunately pretty unrealistic.

I do think we should try to find an organization to take responsibility for responding in such situations and give it the resources to do so (not FEMA, despite the name, it's basically an accounting organization, something which was not well understood beforehand, and is not well understood now). My personal candidate would be the national guard. It's really kind of redundant as the army reserve reserve, but could be recast with responsbilities for disaster relief, civil defense, search and rescue, police auxiliary, etc. Enlarge the army (and air force) reserves to include current guard/air guard responsiblities, give existing guard members the option to convert to army/air force reserve or continue in the "new guard," and recruit members for the "new guard" with its new mission.