Should FEMA’s real letters be P.U.?
A Senate committee thinks so and is urging that it be scuttled and that the federal government, in essence, start from scratch. The Los Angeles Times reports:
Senate committee is urging that the Federal Emergency Management Agency be dismantled and restructured to deal with the problems exposed by its response to Hurricane Katrina, setting off a political fight in Congress over the agency’s future.
“We have concluded that FEMA is in shambles and beyond repair and that it should be abolished,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who heads the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in a press conference today. “The first obligation of government is to protect our people. In Katrina, we failed at all levels of government.”
Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the committee’s ranking Democrat, faulted President Bush as well, for lack of action during the crisis and for not cooperating with the committee investigation.
“For Hurricane Katrina, the president failed to provide critical leadership when it was most needed, and that contributed to a grossly ineffective federal response,” he said.
Collins characterized President Bush’s role in the Katrina response disaster as “by no means perfect,” and the report calls his performance “halting and inadequate.” Lieberman, filing separate findings about the White House role, said he thought the president’s performance deserved “stronger criticism.”
The committee is recommending FEMA be axed and replaced by a new agency – the National Preparedness and Response Authority. It would still be within Homeland Security but its director would be able to get to the President directly in emergencies. FEMA had been independent until Homeland Security was created and gobbled it up.
The report is a damning document. Excerpts can be read here.
Some factors in the FEMA controversy and what’s happening now:
(1) It’s clear in retrospect that, when FEMA was within Homeland Security, there were too many layers between its officials and the White House. This did not maximize the effectiveness of crisis response.
(2) There have been no news reports or reports from Congress indicating anyone is confident that FEMA has since been sufficiently restructured to respond in a highly improved manner to any major hurricanes in 2006.
(3) It’s election year. Democrats will want to remind voters of President George Bush’s performance during the hurricane. Republicans will want to point to all levels of government and say there was enough blame to go around (by implication this means there’s less blame that should be apportioned to GWB).
But the debate over FEMA rages. For instance, the White House does not agree with the Senate:
With President Bush making his 11th visit to the Gulf Coast since the storm hit, the White House urged a strengthening — but no reshuffling — of current operations.
“Now is not the time to really look at moving organizational boxes,” said Frances F. Townsend, the president’s domestic security adviser, who traveled Thursday with Bush to Louisiana and Mississippi.
James Lee Witt, Former director of FEMA from 1993 to 2001, writes in USA Today:
Even with the release of the Senate’s report on Hurricane Katrina, the American public is not being well served by its government with the recommendations. It is time for Congress and the administration to do what is right and pull FEMA out of the Department of Homeland Security — as Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., and other lawmakers suggest. FEMA and DHS should each stand alone. One agency can’t effectively serve two disparate functions.
Though it’s true that both agencies respond to catastrophes in a similar manner, their approaches are intrinsically different, especially before a natural or man-made disaster.
FEMA’s job is to provide leadership and support to reduce the loss of life and property through a comprehensive, risk-based, all-hazards program of mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. In the 1990s, FEMA was an effective, highly respected, stand-alone agency with its director serving on the presidential Cabinet.
DHS’ job includes dealing with national security, border patrol, interior enforcement and intelligence sharing. These aspects absorb the majority of DHS’ focus — and funding. In years to come, do we want the department to be diverted from its mission of protecting the nation from terrorism from June 1 to Nov. 30, when we are in the middle of hurricane season?
The US, he writes, faces problems with FEMA precisely due to government restructuring — and the best solution would be to restore it to its pre-Homeland Security status:” When a successful structure once existed, it makes sense to return to the system that worked,” he writes.
So the emerging debate is going to whether should the government scrap FEMA and start from scratch or whether that would be throwing the baby out with the storm-drain water. Would it be faster — and more effective — to shove FEMA back to its old status? The problem: while politicians and the White House debate, the one certainty is that the new hurricane season draws closer each day.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.