More than 80 percent of the $1.5 billion in contracts signed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency alone [post-Katrina] were awarded without bidding or with limited competition, government records show, provoking concerns among auditors and government officials about the potential for favoritism or abuse.

Already, questions have been raised about the political connections of two major contractors--the Shaw Group and Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton--that have been represented by the lobbyist Joe M. Allbaugh, President Bush's former campaign manager and a former leader of FEMA.

"When you do something like this, you do increase the vulnerability for fraud, plain waste, abuse and mismanagement," said Richard L. Skinner, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, who said 60 members of his staff were examining Hurricane Katrina contracts. "We are very apprehensive about what we are seeing."

As noted previously here, as noted on FEMA's own website, he commented that FEMA was an "oversized entitlement program."

The question now is: for whom? Bush's cronies or the victims of disaster or both? The victims of disaster get short shrift while the cronies make out like bandits.