Members of Congress and the Homeland Security Department's inspector general charged last month that FEMA gave $31 million in disaster relief to 12,000 Florida residents who it didn't verify had property damage after Hurricane Frances in 2004 and may not have deserved any money. They say FEMA paid $9 million in rental assistance to 4,985 Miami-Dade County residents who didn't need it, paid $125,742 for three funerals for people whose deaths had nothing to do with the storm and paid $192,592 for unverified expenses for cleanup equipment.

FEMA's response to Andrew was almost universally panned as too little, too late. In 1993, the General Accounting Office (GAO) wrote, "The response to Hurricane Andrew raised doubts about whether FEMA is capable of responding to catastrophic disasters."

Gary Wamsley, a professor of public administration at Virginia Tech who was the staff director on the 1993 NAPA study, recalls thinking at the time that FEMA would get in trouble for being too liberal in dispensing relief funds. Of the latest criticism, Wamsley said: "It was almost set up for this to happen when they caught so much hell for being so bureaucratically encumbered. ...What I hope now is that FEMA doesn't retreat into its shell again."