Tax Dollars at Work

The majority of the time politicians rant about cutting "government waste," they are just using that line as a politically convenient cover to justify whatever new tax cut or spending proposal they like to promise in election years, without having to list any specific resulting sacrifice the new policy would require.

But in this case, they just might have a point.

When I called FEMA, I was almost immediately prompted to press 1 for English or 2 para Espanol. (For the record, I'm not among those who mind having to do this. I have a law degree and I still can't understand much of the bureaucratic double-speak that often accompanies federal forms and applications. If English is not your original language, then you don't even have a chance.)

So after patiently pressing the English option, I, as you might have expected, conducted my phone application entirely in English. When a FEMA inspector called me, we spoke in English to schedule the interview. When the inspector came to my house, I recounted our losses to her in English. When I called FEMA back with a follow-up question, I again asked all my questions in English (although judging from the responsiveness of the operator taking the call, I would have done just as well to have spoken in Swahili.) In short, I have never conducted any business with the federal government in any other language. It so happens that I've been taking Spanish classes up until this term, but there's no way FEMA should know this.

Since that call, I get daily a new packet of roughly 28,000 pages worth of information from FEMA. It would be 14,000 pages, but for no apparent reason, there is a duplicate Spanish version of every single page in the packet. Just the postage alone on this second set of documents must cost thousands. FEMA knows I don't need this. They even sent me a completed (English) copy of my application along with the Spanish documents that my application itself proves I don't need. Apparently they just think I need to see what all the same forms would have looked like if I had happened to have been from Argentina.

Let me repeat that I'm glad these documents exist in languages other than English. No one should lose out on the benefits to which they are entitled because they use the wrong preposition, or take too literally the question asking for an applicant's "gross income." But does FEMA really need to send copies of every single document in multiple languages to every single applicant? Is it really that hard to just ask the applicant what language they prefer? Or, given that I pressed the "English" option at the start of the process, couldn't the operator just note that on my file and proceed accordingly?

This seems incredibly simple. But since it isn't happening, there are only two explanations. Perhaps FEMA is wasting a whole lot of disaster relief money on the printing and mailing thousands of pages of documents to people that FEMA knows can't comprehend them.

This would be stunningly incompetent, even for a government that allows companies to drill for oil directly offshore even when they have no contingency plan if that oil should happen to spill. So perhaps the true explanation is that FEMA somehow knows that I didn't re-up for summer Spanish classes and now they are trying to make me feel guilty. "See here," FEMA seems to be telling me, "if you took one more semester of Spanish perhaps you could get FEMA relief in TWO languages when the next tragedy occurs!" Of course, they seem to be telling me the same thing in Spanish. (!Mira!, !Si tengas un semestre mas de espanol, puedes obtener dinero de FEMA en DOS linguas cuando el proximo desastre ocurre!)

Or perhaps FEMA knows that I don't have the energy to take formal classes due to the flood recovery efforts and just wants to help me bide the time until I get back on my feet with some free Spanish reading material. This would be a more charitable explanation, but I'm still a bit creeped out by the whole episode, I must say.

"Why would the government care if I take Spanish classes?" you might ask. But since you haven't, I'm just going to go on to my main point. There will be tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of FEMA applicants, just in Tennessee, just for this particular disaster. If each person needlessly gets thousands pages of documents that FEMA knows they can't read, that adds up to a whole lot of wasted trees and a whole lot of money that could more appropriately go toward FEMA's intended purpose.

Which is, of course, figuring out how to fit a French copy of all these documents in the packet as well.