For the last 20 days WWL-AM has been broadcasting the voice of the people. The station's been live round the clock ever since Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans. People tell their stories by phone. A man named John calls up from Washington Parish, an area just north of New Orleans. "If I had the strength I'd slug those boys from FEMA right in the face," he yells into his phone, "for days they've been sending us one ice truck after another, but we don't have any food!" And he's paid taxes to Washington, he says, for years.

The bureau called FEMA -- the Federal Emergency Management Agency -- is suffering its second major crisis. Amid the catastrophe in New Orleans, anger towards the bureau ignited across the region, or really across the United States. Much of the ire was reserved for Michael Brown, the agency's head at the time, who has since resigned. The mammoth agency reacted too slowly, people said; it wasn't well prepared; its chief wasn't up to the job. Now FEMA has a new boss, David Paulison, but the criticism hasn't flagged. The agency still hasn't straightened out the chaos around New Orleans, and the bad news flooding daily from the region is endangering the legacy of the agency's ultimate boss, President George W. Bush.

The chaos at FEMA is easy to illustrate. One reporter from TV station MSNBC noticed that in the last few days, FEMA ice trucks had been parked in a lot of highway rest stops across the Southern states. One call to the trucking contractor was enough for a story: The head of the company detailed, on-camera, how dozens of trucks had been sent from one point to another for two weeks without ever quite reaching the storm-hit region. "FEMA's great for my business," he said, "I get $9,000 a truck. But as a taxpayer I gotta ask if it's a waste of money."

Pictures from places like Washington Parish and surrounding areas raise doubts about FEMA's competence. On day 20 of the disaster, people were still sleeping outside or in storm-thrashed houses. They complained bitterly about local authorities on the radio; so far they'd heard lots of promises but received no concrete help. Over and over there seem to be communications failures within FEMA, and every decision has to be handed down from the top. "The right hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing," said one community leader. "Every time you call, you get someone new on the phone and start all over again." As a result, nothing has happened in his district that the local people haven't organized themselves.

"I'd like to offer you tomorrow's headlines"

Even the responsible members of FEMA won't be aggressive anymore. At the daily press conference in Baton Rouge the spokespeople grow meeker and more submissive. "With what I'm about to say, I'd like to offer you tomorrow's headlines," is how one obscure introduction to the daily information session went last Friday, "but things aren't really going as fast as we'd like them to." With that sort of attitude the bosses at FEMA can't be surprised if almost every major newspaper the next morning reported on the agency's second crisis. "FEMA, Slow to the Rescue, Now Stumbles in Aid Effort," wrote the New York Times.

The agency has also hit a snag in accommodating refugees. Though a lot of people have already left emergency housing in Texas (or elsewhere) to start new lives, FEMA still doesn't have an efficient registration system, which means thousands of people still wander through makeshift quarters searching for lost relatives or friends. This search is gleefully taken up by news agencies, and success stories are garnished with barbs at Washington. That FEMA -- and therefore the government -- has abandoned citizens in a crisis is no longer worth pointing out; it's clear for all to see.

And it's not just FEMA's ground-level aid that's coming under fire: The agency's handling of $62 billion in relief money ordered by President Bush has also raised questions. For example, there's the so-called "Opportunity Zone" which has supposedly sprung up on the Gulf Coast. The cost, however, remains a subject of dispute. And every newspaper has a different interpretation of all the promised schooling and unemployment schemes. What sounded like a master plan in Bush's poorly-directed speech is mutating more and more into a confusing numbers game -- with no particular mastermind at the top.

The President's fine words and promises are now being briskly talked down in Washington. A day after his speech, Bush had to ensure the promised money wouldn't be taken away again by tax increases; but then the question of where the billions would come from became a rich source of debate. All sorts of visions crisscross the political camps. Some talk of cancelling the planned big projects; others want to close down the aid projects already in motion and finance the rebuilding of the Gulf in other ways. In one such new scheme the Democrats say they're catching a whiff of fraud.

Crony-capitalism, as in Iraq?

The need for money swings over President Bush like a sword of Damocles. Every day more money has to be disbursed for Iraq. Why doesn't the U.S. concentrate on aid for reconstruction within its own borders, instead of distant projects in the Middle East, where soldiers face death every day? For a brief time the news from Baghdad was overwhelmed by the catastrophe in the South; but now every day there are new reports of bombings, and no one can even mention peace.

A bitter taste of cronyism -- also an echo of Iraq -- sets the tone for another criticism of FEMA. American papers report that the agency allocated the first multimillion-dollar contracts for New Orleans' reconstruction through a suspiciously quick and restricted bidding process. Among the beneficiaries of this process are some of the same companies who do brisk business in Iraq. Corporations close to the Bush administration, like the Fluor Corporation or Bechtel National, have contracts for at least 100 million dollars apiece to build a designated number of emergency sleeping accommodations.