A Vast Solution Generator

On Marketplace at about the 50 second point, Paul Light, formerly of the (liberal) Brookings Institution says,

When something like [the Katrina devastation] occurs, there's an effort to tie the problem of the day to the solutions that have long been floating around. In fact, Washington can be seen as a vast solution generator, always looking for problems, and when a major catastrophe or event comes along, what happens is that solutions that have been out there for years will try to attach themselves to the problem...

...what'll happen in the next few months is that a lot of these ideas will be packaged and placed into a gigantic supplemental appropriations bill that...will run between fifteen hundred and two thousand pages and will go to the floor...with about two hours notice and it'll get passed, and a lot of these things that each party wants will be in there and a lot of special projects
for individual members will be in there as well.

He doesn't actually come out and say that no one will read the bill before passing it but that's clearly what he means. As the report notes, the right and left are equal opportunity offenders.

That sounds familiar. In AP: 9/11 Recovery Loans Loosely Managed DIRK LAMMERS and FRANK BASS wrote:

The government's $5 billion effort to help small businesses recover from the Sept. 11 attacks was so loosely managed that it gave low-interest loans to companies that didn't need terrorism relief — or even know they were getting it, The Associated Press has found.

And while some at New York's Ground Zero couldn't get assistance they desperately sought, companies far removed from the devastation — a South Dakota country radio station, a Virgin Islands perfume shop, a Utah dog boutique and more than 100 Dunkin' Donuts and Subway sandwich shops — had no problem winning the government-guaranteed loans.

Dentists and chiropractors in numerous cities, as well as an Oregon winery that sold trendy pinot noir to New York City restaurants also got assistance.