cuts to fema and staff expertise has consequences, along with new "control processes"

This is one of the more recent newspaper articles about FEMA and their current capacity to do the work, FEMA Didn’t Answer Thousands of Calls From Flood Survivors, Documents Show

As I shared recently. The Secretary of Homeland Security’s new guidance that she has to “sign off” on all contracts over $100M puts a new wrinkle in disaster response.

This is how controls can work. One from my own past experience from 1995. We had a huge wildfire burning in Eastern Washington. I was the State Operations Officer. We were dispatching a communications expert over to the fire to help in coordinating and integrating communications (we all know that “communications” is the most often reported issue in after action reports). We were purchasing a $3,000.00 laptop to send with the person, remember this is 1996. I got a call from the Deputy Director of the department that emergency management was located in at the time. His question, “Do we really need this computer to have him be effective? $3K is a lot of money.” We got the computer, but with some delay. And, by the way…we had to do an emergency workorder to replace the air conditioning in our building or the telephone switch was going to burn out. That was about $50K.

Then on the FEMA side. A FEMA co-work I knew shared how he had done a $1M contract, while responding to Hurricane Katrina, with a local business to provide Porta-potties. Those types of contracts are written many times over during disaster response. To control all of that, Christi Noem will need to bring her entire wardrobe of outfits to the disaster field office, in order to provide a timely review and sign-off on all contracts. She might consider sleeping on a cot at the office so that she is immediately available.