Mark Foley Quotes
It's an absolute abomination. Whether intentional corruption or mismanagement , it seems like FEMA is just a money pit.
Foley, Mark. Remarks on FEMA. Congressional Record, Government Printing Office, 2006.
The "spigot" refers to the fact that immediately after the 9-11 attack, huge sums of money were available and the Department of Homeland Security was created by moving many different agencies from other departments into the new department. There were poor or no fiscal controls, and at the same time the public officials of the new department were under such extreme pressure lest there might be another attack that they went forward with almost every scheme that anyone claimed would make the nation safer. Most were useless and some just frauds, and much money was wasted. What is particularly interesting about this quotation is that a high government official admitted that things were handled badly and money had been wasted.
Gallatin was complaining about requirements of Congress, with which he and Madison disagreed but were not powerful enough to stop.
He and the other commissioners of both political parties were agreed that the procurement by The State Department, USAID, and especially the Defense Department which spent the most was terrible. The even had military generals in charge of billions of dollars of procurement who did not even know the procurement laws and regulations they were supposed to obey much less the skill of good procurement.
He was a conservative, Republican Congressman from Georgia when he made this statement complaining about the wast of mmoney by Federal Officials and bureaucrats. The thing that made this common complaint memorable is that several years later, he was appointed by President Donald Trump as Secretary of Health and Human Services. In less than a year in the office, he was forced to resign [fired] in disgrace for wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars chartering private airplanes for himself and his staff including one where he spent $25,000 to charter a plane from Washington DC to Philadelphia -- a two hour drive in his government car, less than $100 for the Amtrak train or $10 by the Greayhound bus. The scandal that erupted was made worse by the hypocricy.
Puerto Rico was hit by a hurricane which had a devastating effect on the infrastructure of the island. Cruz, Mayor of San Juan, was frustrated when the Federal response from FEMA and the military was very slow to materialize.
Mark Adam Foley is a former member of the United States House of Representatives. He served from 1995 until 2006, representing the 16th District of Florida as a member of the Republican Party, before resigning due to revelations that he had sent sexually explicit messages to teenaged boys who had served as congressional pages in what came to be known as the Mark Foley scandal.
