43 million taxpayer dollars worth of food goes to waste.
FEMA is a good example of how privitization is not automatically more efficient than letting government agencies run things.
[i]FEMA’s promised “Total Asset Visibility” tracking system is lagging. While homeland security officials last spring described plans to track all vehicles that go through FEMA warehouses by June 2006, completion of the first phase has been extended at least twice, to October 2009, and the system is operating in just two of 10 regions of the country.
The contract to develop that system was awarded, without competitive bidding, to a small suburban Atlanta company in 2005, before Katrina hit. The company, Stratix Corp., has received more than $43 million of $71 million spent so far on the project.[/i]