The material, from basic kitchen goods to sleeping necessities, sat in warehouses for two years before the Federal Emergency Management Agency's giveaway to federal and state agencies this year.

James McIntyre, FEMA's acting press secretary, said that FEMA was spending more than $1 million a year to store the material and that another agency wanted the warehouses torn down, so "we needed to vacate them."

"Upon review of our assets and our need to continue to store them, we determined that they were excess to FEMA's needs; therefore, they are being excessed from FEMA's inventory," McIntyre wrote in an e-mail.
[...]
"These are exactly the items that we are desperately seeking donations of right now: basic kitchen household supplies," said Kegel, executive director of Unity of Greater New Orleans. "These are the very things that we are seeking right now. FEMA, in fact, refers homeless clients to us to house them. How can we house them if we don't have basic supplies?"
[...]
McIntyre said that most of the items given away were not "standard-issue type supplies" that FEMA would have distributed after other disasters. He said that using the GSA, which manages federal property, to get rid of those stockpiles was "standard process."...

Pallets at the Fort Worth warehouse were piled high with boxes of buckets, boots, cleansers, mops and brooms. There were stacks of tents, lanterns and camp stoves for people still displaced, as well as clothing, bedding, plates and utensils.

Meanwhile, Kegel said, Unity's clients can take only "one fork, one spoon, one knife; they can only take one plate. We don't have enough to go around."

But FEMA said the items were no longer needed in the stricken region. So it declared them "federal surplus" and gave them away.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is better prepared for the next disaster, but it is not completely ready for another Hurricane Katrina-scale catastrophe, the agency's watchdog says.

McCain Voted Against Establishing A Commission To Study The Response To Hurricane Katrina...TWICE. McCain voted against amendments establishing a Congressional commission to examine Federal, State, and local response to devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in U.S. Gulf Region, especially in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and other areas impacted in the aftermath; and makes immediate corrective measures to improve future responses. (2006 Senate Vote #6, 2/2/2006; 2005 Senate Vote #229, 9/14/2005)