Why Puerto Rico has so little recovery to show for $17 Billion in government aid

One of the endless stream of charges the Left hurls at Trump is that over a year after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, the island still hadn't recovered.  The Left claimed this was because the raaacist Trump regime callously refused to give the po,' po peeps of that po' island more than ten bucks to recover.

Ah.  Well.  Actually the Trump people put a billion dollars in the island's accounts 3 months after the storm.  Two months after that, Trump signed a bill giving the island another $16 billion.  You'd think those sums would have done the trick, eh?  And yet, according to all reports, all is still disaster.

Now we find a reason:  A former high exec from the Obama administration somehow landed THE key position to award sweet cash to rebuild.  She awarded a $1.8 Billion-dollar no-bid contract to a local hustler, who didn't deliver but showered said exec with gifts--charged against the contract, of course.

Which is why the woman below is smiling.

FEMA executive Ahsha Nateef Tribble

Hurricane Maria hit in September, 2017--eight months after Trump took office.

One of the people charged with getting electric power back on was a FEMA administrator, Ahsha Nateef Tribble.

Tribble's rise to one of the top positions in the government--making $149,000 per year--is...interesting.  Tribble earned a BS in math from Florida A&M, a master's in meteorology from Florida State, then a PhD in the same subject.  So her only experience was as a student.  Yet the year she graduated she was somehow named to the post of Technical Chief of Staff at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Commerce at NOAA.

Two years after grad-school she was named Executive Officer at the NOAA National Hurricane Center.

Five years after graduation, she was the Chief of the Climate Sciences Division for NOAA's National Weather Service, ending up as "Senior Policy Advisor for Weather and Climate."

She was later appointed to the White House National Security Council (NSC) staff, and was temporarily Deputy Homeland Security Advisor.  She was named Obama's "Senior Director for Response."

She was then appointed "Senior Advisor" to Obama's secretary of Energy (DOE)--the notoriously moronic, corrupt Earnest Moniz--who endorsed the award of billions of taxpayer dollars to Democrat-crony "green energy" companies that quickly went bankrupt.

So...a career with glossy, impressive titles.  No experience except government--which is to say, no real-world experience at all.  Yet somehow, in September of 2018 she was named Deputy Regional Administrator for FEMA--meaning that after a hurricane she'd be the person awarding billions of dollars in federal contracts and assistance.

With no real-world experience in either.

The aftermath of Hurricane Maria offered a kind of perfect storm for Tribble.  A local named Donald Keith Ellison, then president of Cobra Acquisitions, took up with her and began showering her with gifts.  The two began travelling together, often staying in the same room. 

If you're a private citizen, no big deal.  But when you're awarding a billion dollars to contractors, having an affair with a bidder is...not good.

And award she did: Ellison’s Cobra got $1.8 billion in federal contracts to restore Puerto Rico’s power grid.  And Tribble had the authority to award another $200 million in public assistance projects.

What happened in Puerto Rico is the same thing that happens routinely in Chicago, Detroit and Baltimore. In another hurricane procurement scandal, FEMA gave Tiffany Brown a $156 million contract to serve 30 million meals to hurricane victims. Brown's company had no employees and no experience in large-scale disaster relief. And was not able to actually provide the meals. 

No big deal.  Disaster victims will just lose a bit more weight waiting for actual, y'know, meals.

As an example of how corruption wastes money: after an explosion at an island power plant knocked out power to several towns in February 2018, Tribble pressured power authority officials to use Cobra rather than their own workforce, even though the local companies were quoting a much lower bid. “She told [power company officials] that if they did not use Cobra, FEMA would not reimburse them,” the prosecutor said.
 Here's the story from the leftist NY Times.  Written to hide the obvious incompetence of Tribble.

Here's the story from USAToday.  Again note how well the reporter hides the meteoric rise of the utterly green, inexperienced Obama favorite.