Waste, Bureaucracy, and PR Stunts: The Case of the Red Cross

NPR and ProPublica have published a
detailed account of the Red Cross’ poor performance after
Hurricane Isaac and Superstorm Sandy. The story reads like a
primer in the problems of centralization, with national
headquarters regularly substituting its own judgement for that of
the people on the ground. At one point after Sandy hit, for
example,

headquarters issued an edict
that the New York operation needed to start producing more
meals.

That wasn’t the problem, [Richard] Rieckenberg told his superiors.
He was in charge of tracking food and, at the time, the Red Cross
was already wasting three out of every 10 meals being prepared, he
estimates. The real issue was that the Red Cross was failing to
gather information about where hungry victims were located.

Officials at the Red Cross’ national headquarters stood firm over
Rieckenberg’s objections. They directed a catering company to
increase its output dramatically, from 20,000 to 220,000 meals per
day. And it had to start with breakfast for 100,000 the next
morning.

In the ensuing chaos, the caterer was only able to deliver 70,000
Danishes the following day, Rieckenberg says. The cost to the Red
Cross: about $7 apiece, much more than normal. Top Red Cross
officials had assured Rieckenberg that someone would get him the
locations where staffers could deliver the meals. The list was
never supplied. About half of the pastries were
wasted.

Worse still, the leadership sometimes diverted resources from
genuine relief to public relations. In Mississippi after Issac hit,

An official gave the order to send out 80 trucks and
emergency response vehicles—normally full of meals or supplies like
diapers, bleach and paper towels—entirely empty or carrying a few
snacks.

The volunteers “were told to drive around and look like you’re
giving disaster relief,” Rieckenberg says. The official was
anticipating a visit by Red Cross brass and wanted to impress them
with the level of activity, he says.

After Sandy, a much-needed emergency response vehicle was
instead “dispatched to an early December photo-op with supermodel
Heidi Klum to tour affected areas with Red Cross supplies.” The
reporters quote one official’s response to the PR stunt: “Did you
know it takes a Victoria’s Secret model five hours to unload one
box off a truck? I was so mad.”

The article alludes a couple of
times to the more decentralized and volunteer-driven groups that
surfaced after the storms. A man from the Rockaways mentions that
Mormon and Amish volunteers “appeared at my doorstep offering
much-needed help” three days after Sandy, a response he contrasts
with the two weeks it took before “the only Red Cross truck my
neighbors or I saw” showed up. Later there is a reference to

Occupy Sandy, an Occupy Wall Street offshoot whose horizontally
organized relief work drew a lot of praise after the storm hit. (At
one point, Occupy Sandy had four times as many volunteers in the
field than the Red Cross did.)

It makes sense to expect such networks to be more flexible, more
capable of adjusting to conditions on the ground, and—when the
groups are themselves locally based—more receptive to local
knowledge. This is understood even within the halls of the
Department of Homeland Security, which commissioned a
report last year that highlighted Occupy Sandy’s successes.
Occupy, the paper concluded, not just complemented the official
effort but “in some cases filled critical gaps.” (One interesting
observation from the DHS report: “In circumstances of rising public
distrust of hierarchical institutions, as is the case in many
communities within the United States today, it would not be unusual
for horizontal grassroots disaster relief networks with strong
affiliations within certain communities to be chosen over
professional response organizations that might try to assert
control over a complex operating environment in a disaster.”)

The Red Cross, in comparison, is a lumbering beast. It is
essentially a public/private hybrid—the organization is
chartered
by Congress to fulfill specific mandates, including relief work
coordinated by FEMA, but it is formally independent of the
government and largely raises its own funds. It devotes
far more of its budget to its (very valuable) blood and plasma
services than to disaster response, but it uses disasters as a
fundraising opportunity. It is clearly better suited for some sorts
of recovery work, such as operating shelters, than others, such as
the areas where the Mormons and Occupiers outperformed it. And to
judge from the NPR/ProPublica report, it suffers from a severe
surplus of bureaucracy. To read the rest of the exposé, go
here.