Disaster response by the federal government isfundamentally flawedand encourages corruption.

Thats the idea expressed in articles published after Hurricane Katrina and in a new paper published this month, one year after the disaster, by two West Virginia University College of Business and Economics professors.

The federal government should not be in the disaster relief business, Russell Sobel and Peter Leeson say inFlirting with Disaster: The Inherent Flaws of FEMA and Federal Disaster Relief.

State governments and the private sector are better able to take the lead, they contend in the article published recently for the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

In their newly published paper,Weathering Corruptionthe pair contends thatnotoriously corrupt regions of the United States, such as the Gulf Coast, are notoriously corrupt because natural disasters frequently strike them. They attract more disaster relief, making them more corrupt.

Sobel recently appeared on a panel at the National Press Club, broadcast on CSPAN -2, discussing the Katrina aftermath. He said each additional $1 per capita in average annual relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency increases corruption nearly 2.5 percent in the average state. He has called for elimination of FEMA and privatization of the agency.

The latest article shows that from 1990 to 2002 more than 10,000 public officials in the United States were convicted of corruption-related crimes. The average was 4 percent per 100,000 nationally, but in Mississippi, Florida and South Dakota the average was 7.5.

Utah, Arizona and Nebraska, however, has less than half the national average.

The professors correlated this to 599 natural disasters in the United States, 56 in Mississippi, Forida and South Dakota. Only 13 disasters occurred during the same period in Utah, Arizona and Nebraska.

Its as if some parts of America are cursed with bad weather and dirty politicians,the authors say.

Its not the bad weather that causes corruption, however; its the federalresource windfallsthat flow into disaster areas, they contend.

Disaster relief windfalls open up new opportunities for briberyby privileging private vendors charged with administering post-disaster supplies in return for illegal side payments,their article states.

Since September 2005, Congress has approved $113 billion in disaster relief for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and a Government Accountability Office study shows that 19 percent of $5.4 billion in FEMA funds have been fraudulently used.

Moreover, Sobel and Leeson argue that the federal government usually has neither the incentive nor the information needed to effectively coordinate relief management. Thus, the best reforms to the FEMA would be to take control away from the federal government.

Effective disaster relief efforts have to overcome the problems of bureaucracy, coordination and adverse incentives, the pair say.

Nonfederal relief suppliers, particularly those in the private sector, are able to overcome those problems, while FEMA a top-heavy bureaucracy that cannot effectively allocate relief resources and subjects its decision-makers to the all the wrong sorts of incentivescannot, the pair say.

In addition, they contend, the power to control relief funds encourages federal policymakers to help ensure re-election by spending that money on key political districts. States that are politically important to the president in his re-election bid usually have a significantly higher rate of disaster declaration.

Historically, states represented on the congressional oversight committees for FEMA receive significantly more money for disasters than do states not represented on those committees.

The best reform Congress could undertake would be to decentralize and depoliticize the task of disaster relief management by taking the federal government out of the disaster relief process altogether, Sobel and Leeson say.

Short of that, Congress should enact reforms that restrict the federal governments role to only those activities that enhance the ability of the private sector to more effectively respond to disasters, they said.

The authors argue that the best reform would be one that reduces the federal role in the wake of a disaster exclusively toopening channels of trade so that private aid suppliers can reach those in need, by repairing transportation infrastructure for instance, and protecting the property of suppliers and disaster victims, so that suppliers will be secure when entering a disaster zone.