Of course, if you read Sen. Kerry and MSNBC's take on it, it's a call to increase the wasteful spending:

The CDC didn't ask for the job of investigating firefighter fatalities. That job was handed to it, after a union boss got a seat next to President Clinton on Air Force One. They were talking blue windbreakers.
...
It might not have hurt their case that the firefighters had endorsed Clinton in 1992 and 1996. The president put $2.5 million in his budget for fiscal 1998 to study firefighter deaths. Congress gave the job to the Centers for Disease Control.
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An investigation by MSNBC.com shows that the CDC routinely takes as long as a month - and sometimes as long as nine months - to visit the scene of firefighter deaths.

I'm not saying that firefighter deaths shouldn't be investigated... but why does that burden fall on an arm of the Federal government... and more specifically the Centers for Disease Control?  Personally, I would think that if there is a firefighter death, that the investigation would be handled by the city government.  If there were failures in equipment or procedures, then they would be able to change them.

More importantly, they have the sense of urgency.  That's their people who just died for God's sake.  They have a stake in it.  Instead, we seem to be outsourcing that to a larger government bureaucracy that has neither the time, money, nor the personal stake to do a good job.  Yet Senator Kerry wants to promote more waste, instead of less.

The Federal government doesn't solve problems, it creates them, or delays solutions.  When are people going to get that through their thick skulls already?