Congress is set to authorize $200 billion in Hurricane Katrina disaster relief funding. Maybe we should take a look at where this money is going.

Remember that ice that got shipped to Maine? Stephen VanDyke points out that it’s going all over the place, at a cost far greater than the actual cost of the ice or the usual transportation costs.

Mike Hohnstein, a dispatcher in Omaha, sent a truckload out of Dubuque, Iowa, to Meridian. From there, the driver was sent to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, to Columbia, S.C., and finally to Cumberland, Md., where he bought a lawn chair and waited for six days.

Finally, 10 days after he started, the driver was told to take the ice to storage in Bettendorf, Iowa, Mr. Hohnstein said. The truck had traveled 3,282 miles, but not a cube of ice had reached a hurricane victim.

“Well,” Mr. Hohnstein said, “the driver got to see the country.”

His company’s bill to the government will exceed $15,000, he said, but the ice was worth less than $5,000. “It seemed like an incredible waste of money,” he said. — New York Times

Multiply that by about 4,000 drivers… a lot of whom unwittingly donated their own time, gas money and patience, and you have a trucking industry that suddenly isn’t a big fan of big government. — Stephen VanDyke

So far over $100 million has been spent to ship ice all over the country, much of which has never been used for its intended purpose.

And then there are those blue roofs.

Knight Ridder has found that a lack of oversight, generous contracting deals and poor planning mean that government agencies are shelling out as much as 10 times what the temporary fix would normally cost.

The government is paying contractors an average of $2,480 for less than two hours of work to cover each damaged roof – even though it’s also giving them endless supplies of blue sheeting for free.

“This is absolute highway robbery and it really does show that the agency doesn’t have a clue in getting real value of contracts,” said Keith Ashdown, vice president for Taxpayers for Common Sense, noting that he recently paid $3,500 for a new permanent roof. “I’ve done the math in my head 100 times and I don’t know how they computed this cost.” — Knight Ridder News Service

It turns out the contracts for putting up those temporary blue roofs were negotiated well before the hurricane hit, at what appear to be vastly inflated rates.

In some good news, the government will be dedicating a lot more resources to oversight, on the order of 25%, which is closer to industry standards than the government’s usual 1% to 2%.

The more than $60 billion in hurricane aid that Congress has approved in two supplemental funding bills includes $15 million for oversight.

But Skinner said that will not be enough to monitor the up to $200 billion that could be spent on relief. The Homeland Security Department’s IG office has set up an office dedicated solely to Katrina oversight and has assigned 60 auditors, investigators and inspectors to watch how relief money is spent, he testified.

Homeland Security will be hiring 30 more investigators over the next three months, Skinner said. With these hires and staff members brought on for limited-term appointments, the number of IG office employees assigned Katrina-related work will double in the next “several months,” he testified. — GovExec.com

Let’s see if these investigators actually do anything, or if they just sign off on every $2,000 blue roof and $15,000 truck of ice going to nowhere.