That has been my point all along about the size and structure of the federal 
bureaucracy. There are too damn many agencies, too many paper-pushers, too many 
heads to the hydra. 

Last I saw there were over 50,000 National Guard and active duty Army and 
Marines in the disaster zone along the Gulf Coast. Add in Coast Guard, local 
and state police, firefighters, and relief workers and I heard some huge number 
of people were involved in the effort- well over 100,000, I think. 

So who is in charge of all those folks? The Pentagon manages the Army and 
Marines. The Coast Guard and FEMA are managed by Homeland Security. The 
National Guard are managed by the governor of each state. Local and state 
officials - police, firefighters, etc. - are managed at the local and state 
level by their own agencies. Then you have a slew of private relief agencies- 
the Red Cross, for instance- with their own command structures and private 
management.

Normally, coordinating all of these folks in a single effort would not be an 
issue, but the vastness of the devastation has created a challenge that the 
bureacracy clearly wasn't ready to handle. 


>I want to drop the subject and get back to work. But take a look at this.... 
>and there are a thousand marines down there and nobody is giving them a 
>mission. For God's sake. 
>http://www.nola.com/weblogs/nola/
>
>-- 
>...as scenes of horror that seemed to be coming from some third world 
>country flashed before us, official Washington was like a dog watching 
>television. It saw the lights and images but did not seem to comprehend 
>their meaning or see any link to reality - Bob Schieffer, Face the Nation, 
>9/4/2005

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