Government Accountability

As hurricanes have pummeled the Gulf Coast over the past month, from Gustav to Ike, 2008 Echoing Green Fellow Ben Smilowitz has been doing the important, but occasionally unpopular, work of making sure federal relief agencies are doing their jobs effectively. Ben runs the Disaster Accountability Project (DAP), a new nonprofit organization that provides a platform for public pressure on FEMA and the Red Cross—a platform that simply did not exist prior to Hurricane Katrina.