The Whitefish Contract Is a Natural Consequence of FEMA's Mismanagement - Hit & Run : Reason.com

The Whitefish Contract Is a Natural Consequence of FEMA's Mismanagement - Hit & Run : Reason.com:
"Congress approved some $36.5 billion in appropriations to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for disaster relief efforts.
Taxpayers should hold out little hope this money will be well spent.
Take, for instance, the $300 million no-bid electrical grid repair contract Puerto Rico's power utility PREPO handed to the inadequate, but well-connected Whitefish contracting firm. PREPO reportedly is paying Whitefish's electrical workers $332.41 a day for accommodations alone.
The Whitefish contract expressly forbids FEMA (which is responsible for bankrolling the contract) from auditing Whitefish's performance, as Reason's Eric Boehm reported earlier today.
It's an insane provision, but probably an unnecessary one, given how little audits of FEMA's past spending have done to improve agency performance.
The latest audit of FEMA's 2015 disaster relief spending found nearly a third of it "questionable costs, such as duplicate payments, unsupported costs, improper contract costs, and unauthorized expenditures."
From 2009 to 2015, FEMA misspent or wasted more than $10 billion, or 37 percent of the funds examined in the audit. 
Despite the damning results, FEMA has failed to act on nearly 90 percent of the improvements recommended by the auditors..."