Maybe a twister will take care of the problem

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) may have been a day late in its response to Hurricane Katrina, but nobody can argue that it was a dollar short. The Washington Post reports that (shock! surprise!) the Federal Emergence Management Agency managed to fritter away a fortune while mismanaging care for the refugees from the natural disaster.

Stored in such places as the vacant land near an airfield in Hope, Ark., an industrial park in Cumberland, Md., and a warehouse in Edison, N.J., are the results of one of the federal government's costliest stumbles in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina -- tens of thousands of empty trailers.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency hurriedly bought 145,000 trailers and mobile homes just before and after Katrina hit, spending $2.7 billion largely through no-bid contracts. Now, it is selling off as many as 41,000 of the homes, netting, so far, about 40 cents on each dollar spent by taxpayers.

Thousands of the mobile homes have never even been used -- not even by the homeless survivors of more-recent storms, who could use a roof over their heads. That's because the regions hit by the storms have not been declared federal disaster areas, precluding FEMA's involvement.

Now FEMA stands ready to unload tens of thousands of mobile homes all at once, inevitable depressing prices for new trailers and potentially wiping out major private-enterprise players in the industry.

Still, the number of homes the agency can sell has industry groups worried about a market glut. FEMA's potential for-sale inventory is nearly equivalent to 30 percent of the recreational-vehicle industry's U.S. sales in 2006.

Do I really need to point out that when the federal government pisses away billions of dollars, winds up failing to help those it's supposed to serve and ends up poised to crush an entire industry as a side effect, it just may not be the agency we want to rely on in the clutch?

Check out my thoughts on who should and shouldn't be responding to disasters in this 2005 column for The Las Vegas Review-Journal.