RALEIGH – Susan Cutter, a professor of geography at the University of South Carolina, specializes in the study of risks and hazards, including natural disasters. As director of the Hazards Research Lab, she has conducted some fascinating work on disaster relief. In a new paper, Cutter and co-author Christopher Emrich show that the severity of hurricanes, floods, and other events does not fully explain the governmental response.
Instead, politics intrudes. Shocking, isn’t it?
“What struck me was how ineffective certain states have been in getting presidential disaster declarations,” Cutter told the Christian Science Monitor. Looking back four decades, she found that North and South Carolina were states with relatively high storm losses and relatively low numbers of disaster declarations. North Dakota, by contrast, is “very good” at getting the declarations, she said.
Research by other scholars on the intersection of natural disasters and government programs suggests that:
• Presidents of both parties are more likely to declare disasters in politically competitive states than in states already safely in one or the other camp.
• Federal spending on disaster relief is higher in states represented by members of Congress who serve on committees overseeing the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
There is nothing new about seeing a political pattern in federal aid, whether sold as a response to natural disaster or to economic shocks. Scholars have demonstrated that President Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-era relief programs did not distribute federal dollars based simply on demonstrable need. They detect a political agenda. In The Political Economy of the New Deal, Jim Couch and William Shughart summarized these findings. One paper, for example, showed that about 80 percent of the state-by-state variation in New Deal expenditures can be explained by political variables such as partisan leanings and competitiveness during elections.
Russell Sobel, an economist at West Virginia University, has drawn the right conclusion. He told the Monitor that the federal role in disaster relief should be limited to repairing infrastructure and protecting people’s lives and property in desperate situations. The private sector, for-profit and nonprofit, should be responsible for aid and reconstruction, he said.
There are plenty of reasons for restraint. Federal money is more likely to be wasted than local or private dollars are. The U.S. Constitution does not authorize Washington to act as an insurer of last resort or charitable institution. And as these studies demonstrate, it is exceedingly difficult to prevent government aid from being used to advance partisan interests or protect political incumbents.
Some might argue that what is required here is only better rules to guide federal decisions and protect against abuse. History argues against that approach – and in favor of a clean break.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.