The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been on the receiving end for the longest time for its response to Hurricane Katrina, has recently given away $85 million worth of supplies. These were supplies that were meant to go to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. It has been discovered by CNN on what FEMA had recently done.
Instead of the supplies going to the Katrina victims, FEMA had given the supplies to agencies such as the United States Postal Service, Bureau of Prisons, and so forth. According to FEMA, the supplies were housed in warehouses. According to acting press secretary James McIntyre said that $1 million a year has been spent to store such supplies.
“Upon review of our assets and our need to continue to store them, we determined that they were excess to FEMA’s needs; therefore, they are being excessed from FEMA’s inventory,” McIntyre explained in his e-mail. He also said to CNN that this was “not news.”
This action has placed FEMA under fire from one of the nonprofit agencies. According to Martha Kegel, these were exactly the supplies that the Katrina victims have needed. Kegel said she was shocked about this news.
Kegel said: “These are the very things that we are seeking right now. FEMA, in fact, refers homeless clients to us to house them. How can we house them if we don’t have basic supplies?”
Overall, McIntyre said that FEMA did not know they needed the supplies. Instead, the supplies went to many different states instead of going to the Katrina victims. The issue of post-Katrina recovery was one of the issues that had put the GOP under fire.