When I was in FEMA it was always of interest to me that FEMA and its components collected mostly meaningless statistics. Disaster outlays on a repeated basis to each county geographic area in the USA was never collected. This might for example be of use in analyzing mitigation efforts.
But now that STATES and their local governments are undergoing severe budget cutbacks it would be of great interest to know exactly how much each state or local government has spent on Emergency Management since say 1990 and what percentage of those expenditures came from Uncle Sugar.
The reason for collecting this statistic is simple. Funding impacts capability. It does appear that between 10-25% of all EM funding in the USA [even including Homeland Security] since 2007 has been eliminated. I think this is a worthy topic for analysis of both academics and practioners. Hoping this will occur.
