U.S. Disaster Agency Financed Secret Program, Report Says

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. —  The Federal Emergency Management Agency, responsible for providing aid during natural disasters, spent most of its money over the past decade on a top-secret program to enable the government to survive a nuclear attack, according to a report published Sunday.

A six-month investigation by Cox Newspapers concluded that for every dollar FEMA spent on responding to natural disasters, almost $12 was spent on the secret program, which was built around a vast communications network.

The network includes a fleet of 300 vehicles in five mobile units scattered from Washington state to Massachusetts and from Colorado to Georgia, according to the Palm Beach Post.

A call to an FEMA spokesman Sunday was not returned.

National security programs accounted for 78% of FEMA’s budget from 1982 to 1991, dwarfing the amount spent on natural disasters--just 6.6% of the budget, the newspaper report said.

Yet the national security program money appears annually as just a single line in FEMA’s budget--”submitted under a separate package,” according to the report, which said a third of FEMA’s 2,700 employees work in the project.

The report was also critical of FEMA’s effort to provide relief after Hurricane Andrew devastated South Florida last fall.

For example, it said, the city manager of Homestead, Fla., pleaded for 100 hand-held radios because the town had only one working telephone. Instead, FEMA sent high-tech vans capable of sending encrypted, multi-frequency radio messages to military aircraft halfway around the world.