Katrina Contracts Will Be Reopened - (sort of)

You know I'm liking the WaPo's coverage these days but they got the headline wrong on this one today. It should have read something like FEMA Fraud Uncovered. So they're going to bid out the 4 biggest contracts -- someday not too soon. Give me a break, by then it will be too late.

The money grafs are buried at the bottom.

The agency said yesterday that it has no plans to compete numerous other deals signed in the wake of Katrina with little or no competition. Also, FEMA has already committed a large amount of money to the four firms doing the housing site work -- $49.2 million in the case of Bechtel. And there is no timeline for how quickly the competition will proceed. All of the firms said yesterday that they will continue to work in the meantime.

The day's events indicated the administration has yet to regain its footing since its slow response to the hurricane's initial onslaught more than a month ago.

In a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.) called the Department of Homeland Security "dysfunctional" and suggested that Congress should rescind half the more than $60 billion it has provided for the relief effort unless FEMA can better document how it is spent.

Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Michael P. Jackson responded that the department will be watching the money closely. "The opportunity to go awry here is large, and we must be extremely diligent in preventing fraud and waste," he said.

Yeah right. These idiots want to create "enterprise zones" while zoning out the workers who will provide the services for their minimum wage jobs. It's so obviously designed to fail, you have to ask yourself, why are they doing it?

The only answer I can come up with is this administration knows they're done, so they're going to use their "war powers" to skirt any available law against graft and corruption to bleed everyone, including their increasingly stunned supporters, until they're dry. They'll walk off with all the money.

They don't care if they go into the red on their "political capitol." They won't be holding the debt, the rest of us will.