GovernmentExecutive.com

President Bush's father took the blame when the Federal Emergency Management Agency was slow to respond to Hurricane Hugo in 1989.

By 1992, when FEMA's initial response to Hurricane Andrew was perceived as bureaucratic, Bush dispatched then-Transportation Secretary Andy Card down to Florida to kick a few fannies, including the one belonging to Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles. That wasn't enough to spare Bush from bad press -- during an election year.

The lessons weren't lost on President Clinton, who elevated his FEMA director, James Lee Witt, to Cabinet-level status. And during Cabinet meetings, recalls one participant, Clinton would bluntly tell the other Cabinet officials, "Give James Lee anything he wants."

So why did Bush's son -- with Andy Card as his chief of staff -- downgrade FEMA, a decision that almost certainly hamstrung the Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts? The answer, of course, is 9/11. Inside the White House, folding FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security seemed the obvious step. But this week, the nation was confronted with the ghastly implications of that judgment.

A day after Hurricane Katrina hit, Eric Holdeman, the director of the Office of Emergency Management in King County, Wash., lamenting Katrina's damage, stressed in a Washington Post op-ed "how important it is to have a federal agency capable of dealing with natural catastrophes of this sort.... Which makes it all the more difficult to understand why, at this moment, the country's premier agency for dealing with such events -- FEMA -- is being, in effect, systematically downgraded and all but dismantled by the Department of Homeland Security."

Holdeman was echoing the criticism of disaster-management professionals nationwide who have warned for two years that retooling FEMA to respond to terrorist attacks and placing it within the vast Homeland Security bureaucracy has distracted the agency from its traditional mission of responding to natural disasters, and that doing so has made it less likely that FEMA will react well to either type of calamity.

Homeland Security's leaders have said for more than two years that the skills required to prepare for disasters, and to respond to them -- two distinct actions -- are essentially the same for natural and man-made events. Not so, experts rejoin. Terrorist attacks, by definition, come by surprise, and precise targets are hard to predict. So with attacks, response is critical.

But with natural disasters, targets are more predictable, and planners can mitigate damage early by, for example, mapping flood-prone areas, or issuing stronger building codes along earthquake fault lines. In the early 1990s, when homes in the Midwest were wiped out by floods, FEMA bought the land and made it a flood barrier. When the waters rose again a few years later, remaining homes weathered the damage.

The administration has maintained that preparing for disasters is largely a state and local responsibility. Yet, because states and localities have been told to spend their Homeland Security grants on terrorism response, they can't pull their weight on natural-disaster mitigation, says Jane Bullock, FEMA's chief of staff during the Clinton administration.

In the coming weeks, lawmakers will undoubtedly question whether FEMA should remain in its current, terrorism-focused department, or once again become independent.

COMMENTS

• FEMA should never have been folded into DHS. Since it has the various other components of this unmanageable mega-agency have peeled away and claimed dominion over areas which FEMA had years of experience and expertise. While FEMA was not without it's problems, as a stand alone agency it functioned far better than as a minion of DHS. Some the the hits FEMA has taken should be redirected to the mayor of New Orleans, who had the base line responsibility to prepare for and protect the residents of his city and made no attempt to use the busses we have all seen flooded to do this. This area, evacuation of those with no transportation, was identified as a key responsibility of the City of New Orleans and it's Mayor during the FEMA sponsored exercise Response '95. Now 10 years later, it has resulted in unnecessary deaths. Bring FEMA back to cabinet level and give it the authority and interaction with state and local governments it once had. It worked far better than its current submissive position within DHS. GovExec.com reader Posted September 14, 2005 8:56 AM
• And the federal government continues to drift without an overarching plan. We are in Iraq without a disengagement plan. We had Hurricane Katrina and the response clearly demonstrated a lack of plan. Multiple agencies were stitched together into a big, ill defined Department solely in response to 9/11 and without plans. Than its Social Security reform, tax reform, military reform-- reform, reform, reform. Can anybody really tell me where this country is going and if there is anyone at the helm on this ship of state? I'm a Democrat but at least Mr. Gingrich had a plan when the Republicans took over the House of Reps. I didn't agree with some of it but it was a plan. Even a plan one disagrees with is better than no plan at all!!!! Where is this ship headed and if we are adrift, isn't there anyone who can start the engine and head us back to port? GovExec.com reader Posted September 13, 2005 9:14 AM
• Stories of FEMA's tardy response are premature and depend on the anecdotal evidence of biased mainstream reporters. Other sources from the National Guard suggest that federal response to Katrina was faster than Hurricane Andrew (5-day response lag), Hurricane Hugo, and 3 others. Given the fact that federal disaster teams must pick their way down through the devastation path of a hurricane, with downed trees and powerlines over roads, with no functioning gas stations, bridges that must be assessed before they can be crossed with heavy-laden trucks, and non-functioning airports - these charges of a slow federal response come from primarily from journalists who have no clue of what the real-world challenges of the logistics of disaster-relief are like. GovExec.com reader Posted September 13, 2005 8:43 AM