The pictures coming out of New Orleans are tragic. Those affected by the devastation include a cross-section of mainstream American society. The devastation transcends racial boundaries. So why are we concerning ourselves with differences in skin color when what is really at issue is the speed with which the government responds to catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina?

Rapper Kanye West remarked during a live concert shown on NBC that, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” These remarks represent an oversimplification of issues that accompanied a slow federal response to Katrina’s devastation.

Amid accusations such as West’s claims of racial discrimination, former Secretary of State Colin Powell remarked that “I don’t think it’s racism; it’s economic. But poverty disproportionately affects African-Americans in this country.”

Economic factors aside, the real problem with the federal government’s emergency response was its inability to respond quickly, efficiently and effectively. The head of New Orleans’ emergency operations, Terry Ebbert, complained that “FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) has been here three days, yet there is no command and control.”

Much of the inefficiency that progressed can be attributed to the fact that FEMA was downgraded from a cabinet-level position and placed within the Department of Homeland Security when that department was formed in 2002.

According to its Web site, the Department of Homeland Security is tasked with, “leveraging resources within federal, state and local governments, coordinating the transition of multiple agencies and programs into a single, integrated agency focused on protecting the American people and their homeland.”

The Department is responsible for streamlining 87,000 different government jurisdictions at the federal, state and local level in an attempt to create a comprehensive national strategy to deal with border security, emergency response, transportation security and so on. And thus we have the source of the government’s slow response to Katrina, that one truism of all governments foreign and domestic: Government is too damn big.

Elected officials thought that after 9/11, the only way to prevent another attack would be to add another level of government to the already overweight, overstretched and overwhelmed federal bureaucracy, giving us the Department of Homeland Security.

Now the government is in serious need of a good gastroenterologist: Gastric bypass surgery is the only way to tackle an appetite of this magnitude.

The federal government should be stripped down to its bare essentials, prevent the gorging of federal tax dollars that accompany innumerable levels of bureaucracy and leave just enough infrastructure to provide some centralized direction at the national level. Any other crisis management responsibilities should be left to local authorities – authorities closest to those affected by disasters.

Hurricane Katrina has shown us that the gorilla in the room is the federal government and its clumsy, plodding response to the gravest of emergencies.

Kyle Hardwick can be reached at [email protected]