As federal disaster response teams continue work to alleviate the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy, Fox News' Brit Hume tweeted some ill-informed snark about how the closure of federal offices in Washington, DC undermines the idea that “big federal government” is “needed to deal with big problems like Sandy.”

This is about as ignorant an observation as one can make about the federal government's disaster response. It's true that most federal employees in the Washington, DC area were, out of concern for their safety, told not to come to work on October 29 and 30. However, “emergency employees” -- like the ones working for FEMA -- were and are “expected to report to their worksites.” Because that is their job.

FEMA has been deploying emergency response teams to affected areas and coordinating disaster relief efforts with other government agencies (Defense Department, Energy Department, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Aviation Administration, etc.) and the Red Cross.

Hume's been in and around Washington for decades, and you'd think by this point he'd know better. At the very least you'd think he'd have the sense not to use the freshly wrought destruction of Hurricane Sandy to get in some petty ideological point-scoring.

Regardless of his motivation, what's clear is that Hume doesn't have the foggiest idea what he's talking about.