Because You Know the Old Adage: Those Who Can't Administrate Run FEMA, and Those Who Can't Run FEMA Lobby for Halliburton

Washington Post reporter Tom Edsall catches us with former FEMA head Joseph Allbaugh, who's down in Mississippi ginning up business for lobbying clients:

After leaving FEMA in March 2003, Allbaugh, who managed the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign, founded Allbaugh Co., a lobbying-consulting firm with many clients in the disaster-relief business.

Among those clients are: the KBR division of Haliburton; TruePosition, a manufacturer of wireless location products, services and devices; the Shaw Group, a provider of engineering, design, construction, and maintenance services to government and the private sector; and UltraStrip, which is marketing the first water filtration system approved by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Allbaugh describes the work he does thusly: "I tell them how to best craft their pitch, to craft their technical expertise so everybody knows exactly what they do."

And those have to be some of the best-spent client dollars since Tom DeLay was but a gleam in Jack Abramoff's eye. After all, Allbaugh was able to sell the Bush administration on Mike Brown as a qualified successor to the FEMA directorship. He should be able to nail a couple of Halliburton contracts and wireless accounts in his sleep.-- HOLLY MARTINS

 Former FEMA Chief Is at Work on Gulf Coast [WaPo]