FEMA Contract Called for 30 Million Meals for Puerto Ricans. 50,000 Were Delivered. - Polidicks

[quote]The mission for the Federal Emergency Management Agency was clear: Hurricane Maria had torn through Puerto Rico, and hungry people needed food. Thirty million meals needed to be delivered as soon as possible. For this huge task, FEMA tapped Tiffany Brown, an Atlanta entrepreneur with no experience in large-scale disaster relief and at least five canceled government contracts in her past. FEMA awarded her $156 million for the job, and Ms. Brown, who is the sole owner and employee of her company, Tribute Contracting LLC, set out to find some help. Ms. Brown, who is adept at navigating the federal contracting system, hired a wedding caterer in Atlanta with a staff of 11 to freeze-dry wild mushrooms and rice, chicken and rice, and vegetable soup. She found a nonprofit in Texas that had shipped food aid overseas and domestically, including to a Houston food bank after Hurricane Harvey. By the time 18.5 million meals were due, Tribute had delivered only 50,000. And FEMA inspectors discovered a problem: The food had been packaged separately from the pouches used to heat them. FEMA’s solicitation required “self-heating meals.” “Do not ship another meal. Your contract is terminated,” Carolyn Ward, the FEMA contracting officer who handled Tribute’s agreement, wrote to Ms. Brown in an email dated Oct. 19 that Ms. Brown provided to The New York Times. “This is a logistical nightmare.” [...] Tribute has been awarded dozens of government contracts since 2013, including one in 2015 for $1.2 million in mattresses for the Defense Logistics Agency, which supports military combat troops, federal spending databases show. Tribute delivered the mattresses, according to the agency. The databases offer only a fragmented picture of federal contracts. The government has also canceled Tribute contracts on at least five occasions. [...] Democrats on the House Oversight Committee say Tribute’s contract history should have given FEMA serious pause about awarding the company a huge food contract. “Clearly, Tribute did not have sufficient financial resources of its own to support this contract,” they wrote. “Based on Tribute’s lack of experience in large-scale disaster relief and its limited financial capacity, FEMA should have raised serious questions about whether the company could meet the contract terms — especially since the contract concerned such a critical need.”[/quote] [url=https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/us/fema-contract-puerto-rico.html]Source: The New York Times[/url] What a complete mess.

If only we had the infrastructure in place to produce rations for relief effo- [url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitarian_daily_ration[/url] ...oh.

Why has someone so incompetent been hired 6 separate times

Soooo, let's see... FEMA hired one woman to make 30 million meals, and they hired a tiny-ass Montana contractor with two employees to rebuild Puerto Rico's infrastructure and it's [I]just coincidental[/I] that the owners are friends with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's family... Yeah, we can call this a completely fucking botched recovery. America, just sell Puerto Rico to Canada for $1 and we'll clean up the mess you clearly don't want to clean up. Never forget that FEMA was asking residents of an island that had [I]no[/I] electrical power to register online for support.

[QUOTE=Lambeth;53112839]Why has someone so incompetent been hired 6 separate times[/QUOTE] Typical civilian contracting tbh.

[QUOTE=Lambeth;53112839]Why has someone so incompetent been hired 6 separate times[/QUOTE] They've been hired "dozens" of times. They've had five or six contracts [U]pulled[/U] from them, presumably for incompetency and failure to deliver like this.

[QUOTE=Lambeth;53112839]Why has someone so incompetent been hired 6 separate times[/QUOTE] Because the US government is largely incompetent at handling corruption and she probably has friends in offices to get her contracts.

[QUOTE=F.X Clampazzo;53112874]Because the US government is largely incompetent at handling corruption and she probably has friends in offices to get her contracts.[/QUOTE] Because, [QUOTE]Ms. Brown ... is adept at navigating the federal contracting system[/QUOTE] In other words, she knows how to bid on, win, and sign federal contracts. Actually figuring out how to deliver, she apparently tries to sort that shit out on the fly and it exploded in her face (and Puerto Ricans have demonstrably suffered and quite possibly died from malnutrition/starvation). Fucking. Incredible.

the rest were delivered to the White House's front door

[QUOTE=Wafflemonstr;53113104]the rest were delivered to the White House's front door[/QUOTE] That explains the weight.

People died because of this. And now fema is pulling out because their free meals are "hurting the economy" Meanwhile whitefish, who are friends with trump and have few employees have been contracted for the electricity in PR but are slow as snails, have a bulletproof contract that lets them fuck up as much as they want and haven't restored power to 1 million people.

Don't forget that the people starving to death are [B][I]Americans[/I][/B]. Imaging giving such little shit for your own people because you want to save money and probably cause the place sounds Mexican.