Robbing Katrina to pay... Who Knows?

Somebody make it stop! It's been every day - lately, every hour, it seems - that I get up and turn on CNN and some seriously screwed up thing the Bush administration has done. This time, it was AP who broke the news:

"WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal auditors on Thursday laid out a scenario of omissions, missteps and bureaucratic nightmares that caused a loss of money and other donations sent from abroad to help victims of Hurricane Katrina.

"[...]

"Because $400 million more has been pledged but not yet received, the GAO is urging that instructions be put in place quickly to handle the money.

"The GAO said that $126 million in cash came in from 36 countries after the Aug. 29 hurricane devastated New Orleans, Louisiana and Mississippi along the U.S. Gulf Coast.

"With plans lacking for dealing with such a large-scale influx, legal restrictions kicked in that required almost half the cash to be held in accounts that paid no interest, resulting in a loss of almost $1 million and diminished buying power for eventual hurricane relief."

It looks like it's finally happened. We've run out of money of our own, so now we have to waste someone else's.

--Wisco
(Keywords: politics, incompetence, Katrina, FEMA, taxes )