FEMA abandons target date for full staffing
New director says he is no longer sure when agency will be near full capacity, cites bureaucracy as a problem.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency again has backed away from deadlines to fill staff vacancies and no longer is offering a timeline for when it will be working at full capacity.
In a briefing Friday with reporters, FEMA Director R. David Paulison said the agency has hired about 85 percent of the workers it needs. This is the same percentage he offered when asked by a reporter May 23 about progress toward a goal of reaching 95 percent of capacity before June 1, when the hurricane season began.
Initially, the agency set a mid-May deadline for meeting that goal. Paulison pushed that date back to June 1, and the agency further delayed it to July, according to a FEMA fact sheet given to reporters last month.
But when pressed Friday for comment on when the agency would finish hiring, Paulison said he did not know and could not provide a date.
He took responsibility for the failure to meet hiring goals, despite only recently being confirmed as the agency's director. He said FEMA has met some goals of bringing in more senior workers, but that some of those hires came internally, which does not solve the problem of adding needed staffers.
"We're going to make sure our front office is full of people who know what they're doing," he said. "It's been slower that I wanted it to be."
"I thought I knew what bureaucracy was at the local level," he added.
FEMA has fallen under scrutiny of the House Homeland Security and Government Reform committees recently for its continued vacancies.
"One thing that the Department of Homeland Security has kept consistent is its inability to be straightforward," said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the homeland security panel's ranking member. "We really have a case of 'FEMA gone wild' over there, if leaders can't even give us a straight answer on how many people are on staff and when we will have an effective fully staffed FEMA."
FEMA has initiated additional safeguards against fraud and abuse, bringing both new technology and additional staffers on board to review contracts and ensure that individual assistance programs are not misused. But Donna Dannels, the acting deputy director of the agency's recovery division, said many of the technologies are still untested.
Federal officials found themselves unprepared for the tremendous volume of data they had to process in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which was part of the reason they failed in some cases to detect disaster assistance fraud, Dannels said.
During Katrina, "we exceeded any systems capability, any resources capability," she said.
Now, Dannels said, more checks are put in place to ensure FEMA's individual assistance program is not abused. For example, when hurricane evacuees check into hotels under the premise of needing refuge, they must first register with FEMA to confirm that they do indeed live in the affected area.
In addition, FEMA is vetting contracts more thoroughly and entertaining more competitive bids, said Mike Widomski, an agency spokesman.