Project Katrina

Paul Krugman of the New York Times reports in an op-ed something I’ve not heard before, which is troubling to say the least.:

Some observers have pointed out that daily briefings on preparations for Gustav, which should be coming from the Federal Emergency Management Agency—which is, you know, supposed to manage emergencies—have been coming, instead, from the U.S. military’s Northern Command.

It’s not hard to see why. Top positions at FEMA are no longer held by obviously unqualified political hacks and cronies. But a recent report by the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security said that the agency has made only “limited progress” in the area of “mission assignments”—that is, in its ability to coordinate the response to a crisis. So FEMA still isn’t up to carrying out its principal task.

That’s no accident. FEMA’s degradation, from one of the government’s most admired agencies to a laughingstock, wasn’t an isolated event; it was the result of the G.O.P.’s underlying philosophy. Simply put, when the government is run by a political party committed to the belief that government is always the problem, never the solution, that belief tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Key priorities are neglected; key functions are privatized; and key people, the competent public servants who make government work, either leave or are driven out.

So almost exactly to the day, three years after Katrina hit, FEMA still can’t even handle something as basic as briefing the president on Hurricane Gustav. Sad, sad times.