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Alright, so I suppose the answer is actually theoretically infinite. It's possible that we could endlessly shovel money into FEMA, and there could still be no money for hurricanes depending on the charge codes. There is no amount of money that one could see going into FEMA that one could feel safe knowing there's enough for actual natural disasters.
The organization has reached the point where responsibility for budgetary decisions is sufficiently diffused that when something like this happens, it isn't anyone's fault in particular and nobody can be fired because everyone was following orders/procedures. Well, I suppose we can get mad at republicans for not authorizing the right charge code as a part of some monster monster omnibus bill.
You could get mad, but before you do that I'd recommend just reading the Disaster Relief Fund monthly spending reports, which are posted, well, monthly. These reports are not only required by law, but break down how the Disaster Relief Fund spending is actually done.
In Annex B, you can see how DRF funding is distributed per month per line item. Per the September report (produced AUG 31, but which would have fed the Congressional discussions that decided to allocate 20 billion for the three months of Oct-Nov-Dev in the short term spending bill), the forecasted expenditures of September 2024 alone was expected to be 9.9 billion... before there was a hurricane.
If you budget 20 bilion for 3 months, but the previous month was already expected to take nearly $10 billion even before there was a disaster, it's quite reasonable to believe there might be more needed within the 3 months window. That is the only shortage currently being faced by FEMA or raised by the government.
This isn't endlessly shoveling money, any more than refilling your gas tank is an endless shoveling of money. It is an artifact of both budgets are passed in general (if you budget for only 3 month averages, non-average expenditures are more likely to need near-term rectification), and the point that the FEMA budget is built to allow immediate response but not the full cost of post-disaster reconstruction.
Which if you are remotely concerned about fiscal prudence, you don't want FEMA to be able to do. You actually want Congress to determine what post-disaster relief should be paid for, as opposed to letting the FEMA-controlling administration spend billions of dollars on its own discretion and then come back claiming there's a lack at the next disaster. This consequence is the charge that was being leveled in the first place!
Because future costs aren't known, there is no reasonable answer to a question of how much money is needed for future disaster relief. It depends on the disaster, and how many disasters, which do not kindly submit pre-fiscal year damage expectations for Congress to pre-authorize against.
Yes, I understand how this shell game works. The processes and procedures have been set up such that if I see a gross mismatch of funds and priorities and I get mad, I'm an ignorant rube that doesn't understand how government works. Pretty cool, huh?
It seems that the funding and command structure of this government organ has already failed spectacularly. I don't know, I'm pretty stupid, so maybe I'm seeing things.
Here's an idea generated from my simpleton brain: how about we amputate FEMA as government organ and create in its place an organization with a budget and command structure so that when funds are squandered there's someone to hold responsible. Maybe there's reasons beyond my understanding why this isn't possible.
Not really, no, and especially when you're accusing the mitigation of your claimed complaint with being the issue.
The premise of a shell game is that you don't know what is under each shell which are virtually indistinguishable, which allows the manipulator to conflate the shells and thus move the prize. The purpose of a funding code restriction is to be extremely clear what each pot of money is for, and to establish clear limits on what that money can be used for so it can't be moved between shells, and to make it a crime against the state to do so anyway.
This would be akin to painting the shells distinct colors (funding codes) and taping different pebbles to each shell (funding pot tracking) and having the shells routinely exposed each movement cycle (monthly reporting) to validate that the claimed item is still there (monthly audit), with the shell-game manager committing a felony if he shifts the pebbles around between shells..
Which is to say, not a shell game, but about as far from a shell game as you can have.
You are certainly projecting anger, and anger is the mind-killer.
Sure- the funds weren't squandered. As long as you start from the premise that they were, you will be confused.
They were used in precisely the way the budget and command structure of the organization were directed to do so. If you made a new organization with the same budget and told it to adhere to the same priorities and it do so truly and faithfully, it would reach the same conclusion. You are blaming the system for what you are saying you want a replacement system to do. If there is anyone in this metaphor to hold responsible, it is you, yourself, and you, for determining the budget and priorities for spending. It is not the executor of the budget and spending rules assigned to them.
Again, I return to the monthly budget and item lines, which you seem to have refused to examine. If you tell your new organization to spend X amount of money on things, and it spends X amount of money on those things, it is by definition not squandering the money but complying with its budget requirements placed on it. And if your organization does not have enough money on-hand to assume additional costs Y when you only allocated insufficient amount Z which is less than X and Y combined, it still has not squandered the money given.
Part of the issue here is that no one has a pre-event understanding of Y needed to determine a meaningful Z, because Y is impossible to forecast, and part is that you have no idea what X is because you have no idea what you have already told the organization to do with the initial Z provided.
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