Last week, thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims were told that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was phasing out emergency housing assistance, leaving some 12,000 families without a feasible way to pay for their hotels.

While 10,500 families have received some type of assistance, either rental or housing in trailers, the question remains: Is this the appropriate time to cut assistance to these families?

New Orleans is still in shambles, and FEMA should have at least provided assistance until these families have a city to go back to. How can a single mother, who has just been kicked out of the hotel room she has been living in for months, possibly hope to return to New Orleans and restart her life?

While the people should decide for themselves how to spend the funds, continuing to pay for hotel rooms without making progress toward rebuilding will not remedy the situation quickly.

What's especially disconcerting about this development is the fact that FEMA wasted millions of dollars in housing, which now could be used to lengthen these families' hotel arrangements.

A Feb. 13 Associated Press article reported that two audits released by the Government Accountability Office and the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security Department show that in the days following the disaster, FEMA paid $438 dollars per day for hotel rooms in New York City for evacuees.

The audits also detailed the appropriation of aid from FEMA's emergency cast assistance program to 900,000 people using duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers, or false addresses and names.

So while 12,000 families are being kicked out of the only place they have been able to call home in recent months, it turns out the government agency designed to assist them in exactly this type of situation wasted money on frivolous evacuee housing and imaginary New Orleans citizens.

The government should not punish the people because of its inability to manage funds.