On Monday, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney of New York—the Chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform—and Rep. Harley Rouda also of New York, as well as the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Environment for the Committee on Oversight and Reform, issued an important statement that is getting lost in the drama of Trump’s lying campaign rallies masquerading as “Presidential action.” The release, boldly called “Watchdog Report Reveals Administration’s Failures After Hurricanes in Puerto Rico,” immediately warns that “serious questions [have been] raised about FEMA’s ability to respond to [the] coronavirus crisis.

”[A] new report from the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General revealed that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) lacked a coherent strategy for using advanced contracts to procure goods and services critical to response and recovery efforts in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria.”

For those who have been closely watching the tragedies unfold in Puerto Rico since Maria hammered the island in 2017, the Inspector General’s report holds no surprises. Many of us felt Trump should have been impeached for his massive failure on the island.



However, to allow the mess, missteps, and mistakes made (and that are still ongoing) in Puerto Rico to be replicated in New York and New Jersey goes beyond any definition of insanity. The report exposes an agency in chaos: duplicate contracts, as well as missing contracts and haphazard record-keeping, combined to leave the people of Puerto Rico without the help they so desperately needed much longer than necessary, and cost taxpayers more than the relief effort needed to.

The office that is the subject of this new report, FEMA Region II, is the same office now in charge of responding to the coronavirus crisis in New York and New Jersey. According to the new report by the Inspector General: “We attributed FEMA’s limited use of advance contracts to its lack of strategy and documented planning process for ensuring maximum use of advance contracts.”



“FEMA Region II did not issue any new advance contracts prior to Hurricane Maria and did not perform analysis to identify goods or services to obtain through advance contracts.”



“Specifically, we identified 49 of 241 new contracts issued in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria for the same goods or services covered by existing advance contracts.”



“Without advance contracts to expedite acquisitions, goods and services for people in need may have been delayed or were more costly to the Government.”



“FEMA did not maintain contract files in accordance with Federal acquisition regulations and departmental or its own policy. … As a result, FEMA’s ability to hold contractors accountable for deliverables is hindered.”



“FEMA’s advance contract strategy did not include a documented process for considering the needs of its state and local partners.”

The press release expands on those bullet points. The details are horrifying.

Oversight Committee Democrats warned about many of these same problems during their multiyear investigation of the Trump Administration’s inadequate response to Hurricane Maria and its failure to learn the lessons from Hurricane Katrina. In a September 2018 staff report , Democrats detailed how “FEMA failed to deliver tens of millions of emergency meals to the victims of the hurricane in Puerto Rico.” The report warned that instead of using advance contracts, “one of the primary reasons FEMA failed to deliver these meals is because it inexplicably awarded a contract worth approximately $156 million to deliver 30 million emergency meals to a tiny, one-person company with a history of struggling with much smaller contracts.” Predictably, by October 2017, “FEMA officials reportedly admitted facing massive food shortages of millions of meals per day,” and the agency was forced to cancel the failed food contract. The 2018 staff report also warned that “FEMA failed to respond to multiple emergency requests from major supermarkets seeking fuel to run generators to help prevent food from spoiling in the days immediately following Hurricane Maria—including tons of fresh produce, dairy, and other perishable products that were desperately needed by these American citizens.” Documents showed that Walmart officials, congressional offices, and the Puerto Rican government repeatedly conveyed these urgent requests to FEMA, but the agency “failed to supply emergency fuel to save these perishable food supplies.” The staff report found that the Trump Administration failed to heed lessons from the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, explaining, “it appears that the Trump Administration’s response to the hurricane in Puerto Rico suffered from the same flaws as the Bush Administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.”

Now we need ventilators instead of generators, and it’s hospitals making the requests instead of grocers. The end result is the same. I was glad to see a few tweets discussing this as it’s time to get this information more visibility.

x Two years ago, a Harvard study estimated that nearly 5,000 people died preventable deaths as a result of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Delays in responding to a disaster cost lives there. We're seeing the same thing unfold, on a larger scale, right now. Ã¢ÂÂ Laila Lalami (@LailaLalami) March 30, 2020

x Federal law requires that the United States Government help Americans impacted by a natural disaster.

I, as an American Puerto Rican, demand that a 9/11 style committee be commissioned to investigate and prosecute, every wrong doing from the federal response to the (1) Ã¢ÂÂ Margarita (@AHappyMargarita) March 31, 2020

x a means to draft bodies.

Americans blood was spilled on American soil by the hands of terrorists, Osama bin Laden paid the crime with his life.

Americans blood was spilled by the hands of a president that loathe them, through his direction to federal agencies. When will

(3) Ã¢ÂÂ Margarita (@AHappyMargarita) March 31, 2020

x POC aware of TrumpÃ¢ÂÂs record in NYC, who recall Hurricane Katrina, and TrumpÃ¢ÂÂs catastrophically incompetent and malicious response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico (and centuries of American racism) *knew* this was *exactly* where a Trump/GOP administration was inevitably going. Ã¢ÂÂ Percy Hopweather (@PercyHopweather) March 30, 2020

I’ve left out tweets that say “we are all Puerto Ricans now” because the fact is, we aren’t. We’re not living under blue tarps (30,000 homes still have them), and we aren’t experiencing massive power outages combined with earthquakes. We are not a colony. We are, however, victims of a complete failure of a Trump/Republican-led regime. That regime’s failure is killing mainlanders and our territorial citizens.

I hope that enough of us will live through this to take corrective action at the ballot box. If not, welcome to more insanity.

After all, as anyone in Puerto Rico can tell you, “Locura es hacer lo mismo una y otra vez esperando obtener resultados diferentes.”