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My attempted Steelman (but also not really) is that FEMA/FedGov has absolute GOBS of emergency resources on tap that it can shower into the area, but it has a real 'legibility' issue, and ad hoc relief efforts make that harder, not easier.
That is, due to lack of decent infrastructure in these areas (esp. after the storm) FedGov can't tell where their aid is most needed, where it can be deployed effectively (i.e. whether there's airstrips and landing areas and people on the ground to distribute aid) and how much aid has already been deployed.
From their perspective dropping 1000 tons of resources into an area that 'only' needed 100 tons is a misallocation, esp. if the place 50 miles over that needed 1000 tons only gets 100 tons.
Private groups that aren't registered and reporting to FEMA are also not legible, so FEMA can't tally the aid they provide into the totals for a given area.
Their attempts to gain enough control and insight into the region to be able to figure this out would look like what we've been seeing. Checkpoints set up in and out of disaster areas, sporadic communications, and some resources idling around while they figure out the best place to send them.
All of this is to say that FEMA 'wants' to be able to coordinate efforts and maximize the impact of their aid, but until the situation is legible enough to them to see what is actually happening, their immediate efforts will be based on figuring out how to deploy their resources.
/steelman
The flip side of the legibility issues is that from FEMA's perspective, letting people die while figuring all this stuff out is not the worst outcome because a dead body eventually becomes legible, they can tally up the dead and identify them and update their records and produce a nice, tidy report about the death toll of the storm, since a dead body doesn't get more dead they can take their time to do this too.
So I worry that the lack of urgency is in part due to simple incentives to establish knowledge and some level of control of the local region before actually attempting to help the locals, and a few dozen extra dead people in the meantime doesn't show up as a problem, just another piece of data to come out of the storm that they have to catalogue, and explain why certain decisions were made.
But if the mandate is to mitigate the logistics and supply issue, legibility is in fact a failure. All of the time spent confronting groups, confiscating their supplies to audit them, and so on means failure at *the reason we bothered to create FEMA in the first place. I think this is one of many things Neo-Reactionary thinking is correct about. The state apparatuses are rewarded or punished and basically held to account on process and legibility rather than accomplishing the mission at hand. And so these agencies spend much time making sure that they aren’t going to get dinged for not following the process that most agencies suck at the mission they exist to do.
I think at this point, most civilians are so done with FEMA that they’re actively trying to avoid FEMA knowing where they are and what they’re doing. Which is a mixed bag. Having untrained people trying to repair things or rescue people is probably a bad idea, but following the rules is likely to see supplies not get into the zone until more people die. The loss of trust in authority is going to be hard to overcome. Not much sympathy as they seem to be bringing it on themselves.
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