85% of All Problems .....

[tw]

What happens when the top man is an MBA - subordinates are lawyers. Well the blackout two years ago across the Northeast was directly traceable to such people. Now this:

Stumbling Storm-Aid Effort Put Tons of Ice on Trips to Nowhere
Ninety-one thousand tons of ice cubes, that is, intended to cool food, medicine and sweltering victims of the storm. It would cost taxpayers more than $100 million, and most of it would never be delivered.

The somewhat befuddled heroes of the tale will be truckers like Mark Kostinec, who was dropping a load of beef in Canton, Ohio, on Sept. 2 when his dispatcher called with an urgent government job: Pick up 20 tons of ice in Greenville, Pa., and take it to Carthage, Mo., a staging area for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Mr. Kostinec, 40, a driver for Universe Truck Lines of Omaha, was happy to help with the crisis. But at Carthage, instead of unloading, he was told to take his 2,000 bags of ice on to Montgomery, Ala.

After a day and a half in Montgomery, he was sent to Camp Shelby, in Mississippi. From there, on Sept. 8, he was waved onward to Selma, Ala. And after two days in Selma he was redirected to Emporia, Va., along with scores of other frustrated drivers who had been following similarly circuitous routes.

At Emporia, Mr. Kostinec sat for an entire week, his trailer burning fuel around the clock to keep the ice frozen, as FEMA officials studied whether supplies originally purchased for Hurricane Katrina might be used for Hurricane Ophelia. But in the end only 3 of about 150 ice trucks were sent to North Carolina, he said. So on Sept. 17, Mr. Kostinec headed to Fremont, Neb., where he unloaded his ice into a government-rented storage freezer the next day.

"I dragged that ice around for 4,100 miles, and it never got used," Mr. Kostinec said. A former mortgage broker and Enron computer technician, he had learned to roll with the punches, and he was pleased to earn $4,500 for the trip, double his usual paycheck. He was perplexed, however, by the government's apparent bungling.
...

Over about a week after the storm, FEMA ordered 211 million pounds of ice for Hurricane Katrina, said Rob Holland, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, which buys the ice that FEMA requests under a contract with IAP Worldwide Services of Cape Canaveral, Fla.

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From the cover story of The Economist on 29 September 2005 (italics added by me) is this major concession:

What's gone wrong for America's right
The Economist has always had all sorts of ideological disagreements with Mr Bush, but our main problem with his administration has increasingly become incompetence. Katrina now stands besides the shambles overseas in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay as supporting evidence. Mr Bush is a bold decision-maker, but he is also a delegator who too often picks the wrong people and seldom fires them. Both "Rummy" and "Brownie" ... are symptoms of the same problem.

America's system of political appointees always risks putting the well connected, rather than the well qualified, into top jobs. But Mr Bush has abused this more than most. ...

The most important is fiscal profligacy. Mr Bush has increased spending more than any president since Johnson, and cut taxes with the enthusiasm of Ronald Reagan. Second, far too much cash has gone on earmarked pork-barrel projects without economic justification. There is $24 billion-worth of such gunk in the highway bill, including the notorious $231m "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska, put there by the chairman of the House transportation committee. ...

Mr Bush is currently resisting attempts to set up an independent inquiry into what went wrong: he would prefer to have an inquiry led by a White House adviser. This is heinous. A thousand people have died and the tax payer faces a bill of up to $200 billion. If those two things do not merit independent investigation, then what on earth does? ...