Forecasters have warned of another “particularly dangerous weather situation” across northern Los Angeles where residents are braced for new wildfire evacuation orders.
Los Angeles, and parts of Ventura county to the north, faced “extreme fire risk” warnings through Wednesday, with officials warning of “significant risk of rapid fire spread” due to the Santa Ana winds – which have gusts of up to 75mph.
This is the fourth time in recent months that Los Angeles has faced a “particularly dangerous weather situation”, and the three previous warnings all resulted in major wildfires, the Los Angeles Times reported.
While that might seem reasonable, shit’s on fire. We can and should audit for any fraud or diversion of aid after the crisis, and those guilty should face very steep punishment. But you put the fire out, in this case literally. Preconditions are simply evil. It’s playing politics with human lives.
Naturally it’s not like there’s any point in an audit of spending before spending occurs. I was asserting that post conditional terms (like CA must return unaccounted expenditures) or requiring the preservation of records for such and audit is a reasonable condition.
Most financial aid and transactions these days is strictly digital and easy to audit because of that.
Other forms of aid like diversion of fire suppression helicopters have other simple means of establishing records that can later be audited after the end of the emergency (e.g. adding a comment on the pre flight checklist).
But if we decide 9 months from now CA has to pass an audit and they tossed their receipts it’ll be impossible.
Were there any demands for conditions like you suggest on aid for the hurricane victims? For COVID relief? For flood victims?
If there were demands like this for all the other aid packages the US deals out every single year, then these aren’t “conditions” on aid… it’s just aid in the normal fashion. There would be no need to demand “conditions” if the conditions are the same as in every other crisis, which either means they want more conditions or they are acting like assholes to make their asshole voters happy. If there were NOT demands like this in the past, why are you OK with them now?
Without knowing which hurricane or flood victims you’re asking about I can’t answer as for them. But for the COVID pandemic? Yes, absolutely. The CARES Act has tons of sections that impose requirements on recipients. It’s not like the federal government just gave away 2.2 trillion dollars no strings attached.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/748/text