JEFF JACOBY
Why the 9/11 fund was a mistakeTHE FUND established by Congress to compensate the families of those who died on Sept. 11 closed its books earlier this year. According to Kenneth Feinberg, the special master appointed to administer the fund, all but a handful of the families eligible to apply for an award did so. All told, 2,878 families received tax-free payments averaging nearly $2.1 million apiece. Payments were also made to another 2,675 people, mostly rescue workers, who were injured that day at Ground Zero or the Pentagon.
All told, the government disbursed nearly $7 billion -- roughly $1 billion for those who were injured and $6 billion for the families of those who died. Feinberg, an experienced arbitrator and former chief of staff to Senator Edward Kennedy, has been widely praised for the skill and efficiency with which he administered the fund, and for the sensitivity he brought to the wrenching job of meeting with grieving families and putting a dollar amount to the lives of their loved ones. Those who know him describe him as a man of sincerity, intelligence, and goodwill. So when he says that the federal payout was a "good idea" -- as he did during a recent forum at the John F. Kennedy presidential library in Boston -- it might seem reasonable to take his word for it. But the government fund was not a good idea. And Feinberg is too honest not to acknowledge its gaping problems. To begin with, there was the injustice of having the feds bestow multimillion-dollar jackpots on the Sept. 11 families when countless other families struck by tragedy get nothing. Asked at the Boston forum why the death of an employee in the World Trade Center is more deserving of compensation than the death of a hurricane victim in Florida, Feinberg acknowledged that "from the perspective of the victims," it isn't. There was no satisfactory way, he confessed, to answer the letters that came from other shattered families: "Dear Mr. Feinberg, my son died at Oklahoma City. Where's my check?" "Dear Mr. Feinberg, my daughter died in the African embassy bombings in 1997 in Kenya. How come I'm not eligible?" "Dear Mr. Feinberg, my wife died in the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, committed by the very same people. How come I'm not getting a check?" "I even got a letter," he recalled, "from somebody who said, `Mr. Feinberg, my husband last year saved three little girls from drowning in the Mississippi River, and then he went under and drowned: a hero. Where's my check?" But the sheer unfairness of the federal fund wasn't the only thing wrong with it. With so much money at stake, the program predictably caused feuds and bad blood. Continued... |
