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I haven't followed the FEMA stuff, but there has been a libertarian claim "the purpose of police is to prevent private citizens from enforcing the law." For a long time I scoffed at it, but I've slowly come around. When I watched the BLM protests there were a lot of police out on the street, but a lot of people were engaging in looting, disorderly conduct, street blocking, etc, with total impunity. But of course, if a group of concerned citizens had come out with clubs to beat up the vandals and looters, the police would have come down hard on them. In some cases there are videos of police arresting citizens who are trying to pull protestors away from blocking the street.
What it comes down to is that it is simply easier for the police to arrest Joe taxpayer-with-something-to-lose for vigilantism, than it is to stop a mob of BLM protestors. Furthermore, it may be more of an embarrassment, a challenge to their manhood, if a private citizen is enforcing the law. The elite don't like the private citizen enforcing the law either, a BLM protest they can contain, private citizens enforcing the law would be far more unpredictable. This model also predicts why despite blatant disorderly crime being so common and unpunished, and gangland violence being common, actual murdering of white children is very rare in a city. The police do take this seriously, because they know threat of arrest won't be enough to stop parents from engaging in vigilantism. So the police still have to do enough actual law enforcement to keep crime to a barely tolerable level.
There is probably some iron law of bureaucracy that states that the bureaucracies primary mission de facto will end up being preventing competition.
Getting back to FEMA, I don't think this is a case of FEMA consciously having orders to punish rural Trump voters. But, as a bureaucracy, they probably have some mandate that says, "our job is to establish chain of command and authority over the disaster area, so we don't have chaos and anarchy, and decision making comes through us." Sounds sensible to people in Washington sitting in the office coming up with the plans. But on the ground, in the middle of the disaster, it turns out it is far easier to stop people from helping, to stop people from flying helicopters in, than it is for FEMA itself to actually analyze and approve all incoming resources, or for FEMA itself to do the providing of resources. So the plan initially is:
But then in the fog of war it becomes:
So the actual result of the organization is that it is an anti-disaster relief bureaucracy. Conquest's third law strikes again.
I think a big part of it is that the BLM and related leftward groups tend to have people on their side skilled at lawfare and so if a protester gets arrested, they can post bail, and any good lawyer can go into court and paint the guy as a saint. Plus if the guy arrested gets so much as a bruise the same attorney can get their clients lots of money for “police brutality”. Ordinary non-protesters don’t often have that kind of attorney on retainer and therefore the police are much less likely to be sued for stopping them.
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Good guess since that's what the one actually called the iron law of bureaucracy states.
Though Michels describes the process at more length in Political Parties.
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