Common Sense? The Stafford Act Does Not Cover Common Sense.

Want to know why the recovery in New Orleans is dragging on and on? It takes 17 months for FEMA and GOSHEP to acknowledge that saving money might be a good thing:

"Reversing a decision that some found bureaucratically absurd, the Federal Emergency Management Agency granted $99,766 to the New Orleans Audubon Aquarium of the Americas on Wednesday for the expense of restocking a fish collection lost to Hurricane Katrina.

FEMA had said that the aquarium should use $616,849 to buy the fish from commercial vendors, a method the agency said would comply with disaster aid laws. But when aquarium staff went out and caught them for $99,766, the agency denied their petition for reimbursement, even though it saved taxpayers over half a million dollars."

Having had first-hand experience with this kind of legalistic, hyper-detailed stupidity bureaucratic mentality from the FEMA / GOHSEP folks, I am surprised they allowed common sense to prevail. The article called it right:

"But state officials say that the majority of 35,000 Katrina rebuilding projects have been stalled in strict interpretations of the Stafford Act, generating mountains of paperwork in which FEMA takes stock of damages as minute as the number of pencils lost at a school."

Think about that - the majority of the 35,000 projects are stalled in government red tape, two plus years after the fact. Just imagine how they will do when Hillary gives them control over our health care.