In the weeks after Hurricane Maria left much of Puerto Rico without electricity in the worst power outage in U.S. history, island officials made a hasty decision to award a $300 million contract to Montana-based Whitefish Energy Holdings, a company with only two full-time employees. The swift backlash over the contract led to calls for an investigation and Puerto Rico eventually revoked the deal—but not before precious time was wasted as millions of Puerto Ricans languished without power.

Now, just a few weeks after the Whitefish debacle, a different government agency is making a similar mistake. Last week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced that it will be unable to meet the needs of the Puerto Rican rebuild, and asked for public comment on a proposal to hire a single vendor to handle all of the shipping, transportation, logistics, and delivery of disaster relief aid to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands for the next 12 months. The contract could be worth more than $100 million and will have an immense impact on the speed of the island’s recovery. FEMA released the notice the afternoon before Thanksgiving—and gave the public just six days to comment on it.

Behind this rushed and opaque process is an idea just as flawed: hiring a single vendor to take on such a monolithic task. The idea could prove disastrous because one company rarely possesses all the skills necessary to complete every aspect of the rebuild, especially the cultural and contextual understanding to get locals what they need. It also represents a missed opportunity to use the rebuilding process to help the Puerto Rican economy. In the post-disaster rebuild, the federal government has a rare opportunity to do things differently, and to turn the recovery into an economic opportunity in itself, by bringing in a diverse group of Puerto Rican companies to do the work.

Evidence from recent natural disasters shows the risks of a highly centralized rebuilding model. After Hurricane Katrina, although FEMA said it wanted to prioritize small, local, and minority-owned businesses for contracts, most of the money was awarded in giant chunks, some more than $500 million, to massive companies like Halliburton and Bechtel. These megacontracts usually do not provide decent paying jobs to locals and instead bring in cheap labor from outside the disaster zone, as happened after Katrina. They also often fail to provide functioning public services, because they lack the relevant experience needed. When the Katrina bills had to be paid, the few remaining public services still operating were gutted to fund the contracts. The firms who took home big paychecks were the same ones whose poor planning and lack of oversight led to stalled recovery times in the Gulf.

The dangers of issuing a big contract to a single vendor are already evident in Puerto Rico. Earlier this week, The Associated Press reported that an unproven, Florida-based company had been awarded $30 million in contracts from FEMA to deliver tarps and critically needed supplies for repairs to damaged homes. But the contract was terminated after the awardee, Bronze Star LLC, failed to deliver any of the supplies to the island. This, as thousands of Puerto Ricans struggle to find housing, clean water not from hazardous waste sites, and primary care centers that still function.

The truth is that the challenge of rebuilding after a disaster is too great for the federal government—or a single company—to handle alone. Local knowledge has been shown to be critical for rebuilding efforts. What we’ve learned from other hurricane rebuild efforts is hard to miss—that local input isn’t a “nice to have,” but a “need to have.” After Hurricane Sandy, the New Jersey recovery was spearheaded by 30 local businesses with federal contracts. Similarly, in post-Katrina New Orleans, repopulation picked up steam when federal and local efforts came together to share information about individual neighborhood blocks and collectively address the challenges to rebuilding them.

Some of the most effective efforts in Puerto Rico over the past two months have been led by Puerto Rican innovators and activists, such as Spanish chef José Andrés, who, with a team of local chefs, who has served over 3 million free meals, and Lin Manuel Miranda, who has created a $2.5 million hurricane relief fund and has been vocal about empowering the community to help themselves. These local contributions have been leading the recovery fight and picking up the slack where the federal government and contractors have failed.

Of course, local collaborations can work with or without federal leadership—but here’s an opportunity for FEMA to lead. Unfortunately, based on the FEMA notice released last week, the agency intends to go the opposite direction. The notice is just the first step toward signing a contract, asking the public for comments on its requirements and goals. But the initial proposal wouldn’t require that the chosen vendor possess any expertise on the needs of the island, and it doesn’t incorporate local input. With no incentive to solicit local knowledge or labor, a single-vendor contract could mean an army of mainland workers will descend for the large payouts.

There’s a better way for FEMA to award this federal money. After FEMA quietly issued its request for comment, a group of former Obama administration officials, including one of the authors of this op-ed, launched a new initiative to persuade FEMA to use its contract to empower 100 local businesses across Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands to serve their own communities. The Rebuild Puerto Rico RFI initiative asks the agency in awarding a contract to favor companies that: hire locally; engage with the community and communicate with local business, government, and non-governmental organizations; and work with the public participation to set quality standards and review overall performance. In addition, the initiative requests to make data on money spent and activities completed public, without which it can be difficult to align rebuild efforts from disparate sources, and add additional transparency measures.

Distributing millions of dollars through dozens of contracts with small local businesses would require a more intense management strategy than FEMA has previously employed for disasters. But by breaking apart the immense task of rebuilding Puerto Rico into smaller, more manageable chunks, it will be significantly easier to tackle each individual piece and track the progress of the rebuild inch by inch. As small businesses report on their progress, FEMA will gain a more honest, on-the-ground view of the recovery from the members of the community themselves.

The fundamental question of this rebuild is surprisingly simple: Why not have a trucking and warehouse company in Rincón serve the people of Rincón? And, since unemployment rises in the wake of disasters, why not give this money back to Puerto Ricans for a much-needed economic boost? Local businesses and NGOs can—and should—play a central role in the delivery of services and the rebuilding of their own community. It’s the only way for Puerto Rico to truly recover.

Vivian Graubard is the director of strategy for Public Interest Technology at New America. She was a founding member of the United States Digital Service under President Barack Obama and served as a senior adviser to the United States Chief Technology Officer. Emma Coleman is a Millennial Public Policy Fellow for the Public Interest Technology initiative at New America.

This has been updated to clarify that the chef Jose Andres is Spanish.

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