IT Incompetence at FEMA
The form used on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to apply for aid won't work without Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher. (See http://www.fema.gov/register.shtm.)
If FEMA were an online merchant of, say, underwear, this wouldn't matter much. If this hypothetical merchant chose only to do business with customers running Windows, poor business choice - but not a big deal.
In the case of FEMA aid for those affected by Katrina it is more of an issue because telephone access to FEMA is problematic (if phones are available at all to those in need, the FEMA lines have been described as "quite congested").
There's no good reason that I know of to deny relief to people who might have access to a Mac or a Linux terminal (or, for whatever reason, are not running IE6).
This IT blunder is certainly not the biggest mistake that FEMA has made recently. But, as Jim Rapoza points out in a recent opinion piece in eWeek, there's no excuse for it either. As Repoza puts it, incompetence and laziness in this case "are causing those in great need to potentially go without aid."
To put this blunder in context, it would take me at most a few hours to write the FEMA form in a standards-compliant way so that it could be opened in any web browser.
It's also symptomatic of the culture of incompetent greedy cronyism foisted by the Bush administration on our country.
Posted by Harold Davis at September 21, 2005 01:26 PM
