On the recordDecember 20, 2012
In the response portion of the report we will file, the GAO said a third of the disasters over the last 8 years cost the Federal Government less than $10 billion. They also said the level of loss necessary to declare a disaster hasn't changed in a couple of decades. My concern was--and the report leveled it out--that when we do have a big disaster, such as Sandy, we have almost always spent all the money because it was pretty easy to have a Governor ask for a disaster and the President to declare it and then the money is gone. FEMA primarily relied on the per-capita damage indicator as the criteria rather than whether the local community had the resources to deal with this on its own. There was no specific criteria at FEMA to decide at what point we paid various percentages up to 100 percent coming from the Federal Government. The FEMA administrative costs from 1989 to 2011 had doubled. It had increased from 9 percent of every disaster to an average of 18 percent of every disaster. So GAO recommended we do several things: that FEMA develop a methodology to more accurately assess what a jurisdiction was able to do; that we develop criteria to know when the Federal Government should accept all of the obligation--100 percent of the adjusted cost--and that we implement new goals to track why these costs of administering disasters were going up so dramatically. Hopefully, we can do that, and we can look at the law at the right time in the right way.…
