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I’ve spent a good deal of time in disasters that weren’t my marriage, and I think the concern here is that FEMA is the payer and coordinator of the federal response.

Let’s take a sexy part of that topic; helicopter rescue and transport in hurricanes. FEMA has a list of providers ready to shift resources, contracts in place, prep teams, and on declaration of an emergency, can authorize payment for resources to begin moving and staging out of a hurricane’s path, gassed and ready to move in. Helicopters are expensive, and it takes the promise of federal reimbursement to move them.

Now something less sexy and more important; water and food. FEMA has contracts in place with set rates for purchase, transportation, and distribution (including personnel) for these resources. Again, while all the helicopter crews are doing their little dances that they get paid to go look cool, these private contractors are gearing up to position out of the storm path, go to designated staging areas once the storm passes, and await direction. This is coordinated with the state response by the FEMA disaster office in Colorado (after Katrina we realized putting response commands in the storm path wasn’t the best idea).

FEMA’s job is to move massive amounts of resources to an area to mitigate the overwhelming of local resources. Shifting this coordination to a state level doesn’t make sense, unless every state carbon copies what FEMA already does, and puts all these contacts in place. I find this a bad idea, because the power of being a single payer with the purse meant the federal government sets the price, like with medicaid. I see this resulting with more frequently hit states (like florida) paying more for resources by contract, because they are calling for limited resources often, they need them, and they are now competing with, say Texas, who might also want helicopter in their response. Also this creates the specter of “what if there are two disaster at the same time?” Before, FEMA would divide the resources as best available. With the change, the free market would determine who gets the bottled water first.

Neat, thanks for this

As someone who lives in one of those tiny states, I believe it. We don't have many natural disasters here; the last one was the ice storm of '08.