Government Executive - Authors - Justin Rood

Threat Connector

Justin Rood — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Two years ago, John Brennan got the nod to build a new kind of intelligence organization. But to do it, he had to persuade the most powerful, turf-conscious agencies in government to donate staff and money.

On May 1, 2003, the top echelon of the U.S. intelligence community gathered to cut the ribbon on a warren of new offices on the fourth floor of CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Intelligence chief and CIA Director George Tenet was there, along with FBI Director Robert Mueller III. John Gordon, President Bush's homeland security adviser, was present, as well as top intelligence officials from the Homeland Security, Defense and State departments.

The offices behind the ribbon held a dismal surprise: a mere 30 analysts, mostly novices, working furiously in temporary space tracking a flood of data on terrorist money, movements and identities. Between their desks, haphazard tangles of cable fed classified and unclassi- fied information to their computers. It was the new Terrorist Threat Integration Center, charged with keeping the president informed. And it could barely fly.

"It wasn't fun," says Deborah, who served the center's chief of staff in the early days. She declined to be identified by her full name for this article. Most of the analysts had less than a year of experience, and only five or six could be counted on "to dig into something, understand it and . . . come to the right conclusions," she says.

Later expanded and renamed the National Counterterrorism Center, the program today is markedly more able. In a shiny new Northern Virginia facility, more than 130 analysts read traffic from nearly 30 classified and unclassified networks, including operational details of ongoing counterterrorism operations. The center hosts three video teleconferences a day to update the executive branch on recent threat information and maintains a 24-hour watch center. In addition to fusing terror intelligence, it recently has been charged with coordinating the U.S. government's counterterrorism strategy.

TTIC was the nation's first permanent joint center, intended to harmonize the efforts of various agencies rather than become a locus of power in its own right. The men cutting the ribbon were only grudgingly part of history: Each had to sacrifice money, staff and authority to create the center.

Key to the historic effort was John O. Brennan, a longtime Tenet aide and confidant. Brennan was deputy executive director for Central Intelligence when he left; before that he served as Tenet's chief of staff. Together with a hand-picked team of senior managers, Brennan scrapped with some of the biggest, strongest, most entrenched bureaucracies in the federal government to build his center to the specifications of the White House edict that created it.

The idea grew out of meetings of a group of high-level national security officials. The team was convened in late 2002 by the White House to address the information-sharing problem that hindered U.S. intelligence efforts leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Brennan was a part of the group, along with Pasquale D'Amuro, the FBI's executive assistant director for counter-terrorism and counterintelligence; Richard Haver, special assistant to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; and Richard Falkenrath, senior director for policy and plans and special assistant to the president in the White House Office of Homeland Security. The chairman was Winston Wiley, then Tenet's top official for homeland security.

In six weeks, the group hashed out the basic idea for the center. The sum of the many counterterrorism efforts of the U.S. government, it would fall under the Director of Central Intelligence but get its information from all relevant agencies and be staffed by analysts from those agencies. "There was a lot of jockeying at the time to try and protect turf," recalls Falkenrath, now a fellow with the Brookings Institution. It was clear, however, that the White House wasn't going to let one agency handle the job. With legislation, Congress had assigned the task to DHS, but the White House disregarded that. By mid-January, the plan for TTIC was forwarded with approval from all parties.

At that time, the president's staff was preparing his State of the Union speech. "They wanted to incorporate [the idea] into the [speech]," Brennan recounts. "Officials felt the idea had merit, even though it wasn't fully formed and no one knew what it was going to look like." But a strong idea absent a strong plan was good enough for Bush; he inserted a fateful line. "Tonight, I am instructing the leaders of the FBI, the CIA, the Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to develop a Terrorist Threat Integration Center," he told the world on Jan. 28, 2003, "to merge and analyze all threat information in a single location."

At the time of the announcement, major questions still had not been answered. Where would the center be located? What were its specific responsibilities? Who would pay for it? The White House was mum. "It was left intentionally vague," says Brennan, "because the details, the engineering, was not done." That would quickly change. The White House gave the project a May 1 deadline.

In March, Tenet tapped Brennan to head the center. In six weeks, he was expected to have staff, an office, computers and access to enough information to produce a credible analysis of the terrorist threat for the president. With the destruction of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon still fresh in American's minds, failure was not an option.

The easiest problem was finding space. There were offices on the fourth floor of the CIA's headquarters that fit TTIC's needs-they were secure and had good network connectivity. Moreover, he didn't have to go far to request them. "I was chair of the [CIA office] space board," Brennan recalls, chuckling. "I knew what space might be available."

A bigger challenge was building a team. As a joint center, TTIC would rely on its partner agencies-the CIA, the FBI, Defense, Homeland Security, State and others-for analysts. Brennan wouldn't get to cherry-pick his experts; he would get whomever the agencies decided to send over. Given the lack of warm feelings among his center and those agencies, he wasn't expecting their best people.

"I knew I was going to get a bell curve that was on the left side of the experience spectrum," Brennan recalls tactfully from his office at The Analysis Corp., a private intelligence consulting firm in Northern Virginia, where he is president. He joined the company after retiring from NCTC in August 2005. "I wanted to have stars in the management positions. I knew I was going to be putting a lot of responsibility on them. They were the ones who were going to be the quality control."

He brought over his chief of staff, Deborah, whom he trusted implicitly. He also stole away the CIA's deputy chief financial officer, Cindy Bower. He plucked a senior technologist from the Defense Intelligence Agency. By design, he had deputies from DHS and the FBI. "It was important to have an ecumenical leadership," Brennan says.

One major unknown was the source of the center's funding. Congress had appropriated the budget for that year. Already the center was usurping the authority of its "partner" agencies and stealing their staff. Could it pass the hat for contributions, too? The White House said yes. "[The Office of Management and Budget] ended up taxing each of the partners," recalls Bower. "It did not go over well."

"Anytime an organization is 'taxed,' they don't like it at all," says Brennan. "A lot of organizations dragged their feet. . . . Sometimes we had to keep knocking on certain doors," he remembers. "[But] it was something OMB had decided."

To make the case, Brennan's team used reason and openness. "We built a pretty responsible, realistic budget," says Bower. "It [included] training and travel, desks and phones." Then they offered to brief each of the partner agencies on what their money would pay for. That way, "They would at least feel comfortable with what we were going to do, and see that we weren't asking for unrealistic things."

When that didn't work, Brennan says, he swapped the carrot for the stick. "If I needed to, I raised it with George [Tenet]. He would have his meetings, and it would be one of the agenda items." In the end, the center got the money.

The biggest challenge to making TTIC a success, Brennan says, was establishing it as the primary integrator and analyzer of terrorist threat information. The squabbles over territory that started when the White House first convened a working group never dissipated. Homeland Security had a congressional mandate to consolidate terror intelligence that arguably trumped the center's presidential direction. The FBI always had primacy over domestic terror threats; how could it be sure constitutional protections for Americans would be respected?

Perhaps the most aggressive competitor was the CIA's Counterterrorist Center. It had done TTIC's job, and officials there saw no reason to give up turf.

The bureaucratic battle escalated. Despite having several hundred of the most qualified counterterrorism analysts in the government, CTC refused to give TTIC an adequate number of assignees, according to a 2004 White House inquiry. Instead of building a joint capacity to share and analyze terror intelligence, each player was developing its own intelligence capabilities, undermining TTIC's ability to succeed.

"We kind of just showed up in three months out of nowhere," says Deborah, Brennan's one-time chief of staff. "We spent a lot of time talking with partner agencies, trying to deconflict things." The threat integration center struggled to explain that instead of becoming a new power site, it sought to meld existing capabilities. "We want to do this in a complementary fashion," she says, "as a joint venture, an orchestration of effort. This isn't about NCTC grabbing all the glory."

Ironically, despite the conflicts with the CIA, some partners suspected the new center was really a CIA operation. After all, Brennan had spent most of his career with the CIA, the center was housed in CIA headquarters, and most of its staff and budget came from the CIA.

"I spent lots of time on the phone with [FBI Director] Mueller, explaining to him I don't fall under the CIA," Brennan recalls. Even on Capitol Hill, Brennan says he was accused of being CIA. Despite pressure from senior CIA officials, however, Brennan says he refused to give them preferential treatment. He went out of his way to create an image of the center as independent, going so far as to create identity badges that sported the center's logo, not the CIA's. "A lot of times people got stopped at the gate because [the guards] didn't recognize it," he says.

He also laid down to his staff a rule of the road: Being at the center of terrorist intelligence, you have access to information your home agency doesn't. Don't share unauthorized intelligence with your buddies back at the FBI or Customs or the CIA. We're only trusted with agencies' secrets because we can keep them. "I had two instances in the first year of [analysts'] unauthorized sharing with their home organizations," Brennan recalls. "I dismissed them immediately." That sent a strong message to partner agencies, he believes.

While conflicts between the center and its partners appear to have subsided, they have not disappeared. "That never goes away," says retired Navy Vice Adm. John "Scott" Redd, who has held the reins at NCTC since Brennan resigned in August. "Even today . . . the natural reaction of an agency is, 'Wait a minute, we've got a dog in this fight.' Sometimes there is [an] issue of authorities." With the CIA in particular, Redd admits his center's relations aren't strong. "I won't tell you that everything's rosy." While he says he has a good relationship with current CIA Director Porter Goss, "We're still working through how to do this the right way."

Asked about the joint center's progress since its first days, Russell Travers, a former Defense official who is now NCTC's deputy director for information sharing, waxes philosophic. "This is a revolutionary change for the community," he says. "We've got to crawl, walk, [then] run." Right now, "we're jogging."

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Dicey Diplomacy

Justin Rood — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's pro-democracy push in radical countries rattles Foreign Service ranks.

Pundits wasted little time predicting the apocalypse after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced her "transformational diplomacy" initiative during a Jan. 18 speech at Georgetown University. There is serious risk it could "implode from an overdose of hypocrisy," former CIA operative Reuel Marc Gerecht warned in the Weekly Standard, alleging Rice's pro-democracy agenda would conflict with State's realpolitik stance with Iran.

In the abstract, Rice's initiative sounds bold: Push Washington's presence out to the edge of the empire by reducing staff in Cold War hangover countries, including Germany and Russia, and sprinkling them throughout strategically important countries in the developing world. There, diplomats will reach past troubled governments to connect directly with their citizens, pushing the message of democracy, free markets and the American way.

In its specifics, however, the plan is decidedly modest. In her first round of diplomatic musical chairs, Rice will shift about 100 positions out of old Cold War bastions and related positions in Foggy Bottom to nations such as China, India, Indonesia, Lebanon and Tajiki-stan. Rice expects to move just 300 others during her tenure at State-that's a total shift of only 6 percent of the 6,400-member Foreign Service officer workforce.

"It's not a radical overhaul," says Ambassador J. Anthony Holmes, president of the American Foreign Service Association, which has endorsed Rice's effort. The negative impact on certain Foreign Service officers is likely to be minimal, he adds. Only "25 people have been directly affected" so far, Holmes says.

That doesn't mean Foreign Service officers aren't worried. Holmes says they see a danger in Rice's proposal to station officials in one-person consulates-so-called American presence posts-some in the hinterlands of unfriendly countries. "How will we protect our people?" he says. "In this day and age, it's difficult to represent the U.S. government overseas."

The idea is "180 degrees counter to existing law and State Department policy," Holmes asserts. After the devastating 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, Congress ordered a host of strict security measures for State buildings overseas, including 100-foot setbacks from roads and co-location of as many operations as possible within main embassy compounds, so that State's Diplomatic Security Service doesn't have to struggle to protect a smattering of smaller offices throughout a city or region.

The State Department declined repeated requests for interviews but e-mailed a prepared statement from then-Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Resources Ruth Whiteside now director of the Foreign Service Institute. "On security, as we always do when we open any new post, whether a new consulate or a small 'presence' post, security is always a part of our planning," she said. "This will be an ongoing process."

But the plan has critics outside the United States as well. For instance, the British Observer newspaper sarcastically noted that Rice's increased focus on "public diplomacy"-pushing American messages directly to a foreign population, bypassing their government-turn diplomats into proselytizers or propagandists, "missionaries for the democratic gospel."

AFSA's Holmes brushes off that concern. The State Department often has bypassed host governments to speak and work directly with citizens, particularly in trouble spots. "We've always done that stuff," he says.

The greatest danger to Rice's plan doesn't necessarily lie in the places and manner in which it is implemented, but in the places it ignores. By highlighting its commitment to democracy overseas, Gerecht notes, the Bush administration makes its selective tolerance of despotic regimes more egregious. In light of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, how can America's close relationships with the Saudi monarchy and Pakistan's totalitarian leadership be explained? Rice's plan could be judged not by the aggressiveness of U.S. pro-democracy efforts, but by the seemingly unjustifiable exceptions it makes for some countries.

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Wasted Year

Katherine McIntire Peters, Chris Strohm, and Justin Rood — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

From in-house bickering to a fumbled national crisis, the Homeland Security Department is still a mess.

Patience has worn thin with Homeland Security Department Secretary Michael Chertoff since he took the reins last March, even among those who have labored in the department's trenches and usually could be counted on for some sympathy, or at least to hold the party line.

"I like Chertoff and his people," says a former senior official. "But not what they've done in the past year. It's been a wasted year, really."

DHS has made little progress during the past 12 months. How little? The department's report on management challenges for 2006 contains sections that were cut and pasted from the 2005 report.

The department has not been devoid of success: Its U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program met a congressional deadline to install biometric scanning equipment at more than 200 ports of entry. Also up and running is the 2002 Support Anti-Terrorism by Fostering Effective Technologies Act approval process, which is intended to spur development of counterterrorism tools by limiting companies' liability if their products fall short.

But the list of failures is longer. Homeland Security's response to Hurricane Katrina set a new standard for government incompetence. The department has made almost no headway in securing high-profile targets such as mass transit systems, cargo shipments and chemical plants.

"It was a year of tremendous pressure obviously placed upon [Chertoff] and the new directorates at the department," said G. William Hoagland, senior budget adviser to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., during a January forum in Washington. "It was a year when managing rapidly changing events pushed officials to their limits, both mentally as well as physically." DHS has been treading water instead of integrating its many components. The department delayed rollout of MaxHR, its controversial new personnel system, after a federal court found key portions to be illegal. Emerge2, the expensive, unwieldy program to unite the department's financial systems, collapsed under its own weight. The procurement office, meant to streamline billions of dollars of purchases each year, continues to struggle from chronic underfunding and understaffing.

What's more, all Homeland Security's failings took place in the spotlight. Not only has the department's every move been scrutinized by the press and public, but every action is parsed and seized upon for political advantage in Congress and by the Bush administration. The politicization of almost everything related to DHS is reflected in the reluctance of highly placed former officials to speak on the record about their experiences. Only off the record have they been willing to talk about how management problems hobbled the department from the start.

Chertoff came in intending to tackle those problems. When he took the helm last spring, he promised big changes, stemming from a massive, no-stone-left-unturned study of DHS. "Old categories, old jurisdictions, old turf will not define our objectives," he promised an audience at The George Washington University when he announced his second stage review.

After his speech, Chertoff sequestered himself, insiders say, keeping company with only a small group of key advisers-mostly transplants from the Justice Department, where Chertoff had served as assistant attorney general for the criminal division from 2001 to 2003, before his brief stint as a federal appeals court judge. For senior officials outside Chertoff's circle, "There's no access," says a former official. Chertoff's style was a jarring contrast to that of his predecessor, Tom Ridge, former congressman and Pennsylvania governor. Ridge managed with the extroverted style of a politician, with many meetings and public appearances, lots of handshakes and exhortations to work as a team.

While to some it came off as empty cheerleading and glad-handing, many staffers who labored 80-plus-hour weeks to hold the new department together seemed to appreciate Ridge's approach.

Insiders vs. Outsiders

That's changed, recently departed staffers agree. "Now, Chertoff's advisers are the team," says a former headquarters official. "They send out requests for information, 'Give me a 10-page issue paper on the history of a certain program.' You never hear what goes on behind that."

While disappointing or frustrating to some, the situation also is not surprising. "It's what you'd expect. It's the difference between a politician and a judge," says another former aide to Ridge's inner circle familiar with the dynamic.

The clock ticks on, even as former judges deliberate, and Chertoff's review, originally slated to end in May 2005, stretched to July. Senior posts emptied and weren't filled. At one point, more than 20 key positions, including several undersecretary and assistant secretary spots, were empty or filled with acting appointees, because the reorganization was expected to eliminate or change several posts.

Chertoff's secretive second stage review sowed doubt among many employees that their projects would stay intact. Lacking leadership, much work ground to a halt. "Nothing happened" during the review, a former headquarters official says. "The holds on nominations had an inordinate effect" on DHS, explains another top-level player, because so much change was set to occur in a "fragile" department, but no one knew what the changes would be. Projects missed deadlines, rollouts were delayed, improvements were put on hold and the department fell behind on crucial efforts to protect the country.

Finally, on July 13, Chertoff emerged to announce the first results of the review, and the beginning of a shake-up: He created several offices, split up two directorates, eliminated a third, shifted a number of smaller operations and announced some new policies. Nominations started flowing to the Hill to permanently fill empty seats.

The department responded, swinging into action to implement Chertoff's changes. The engines of the DHS bureaucracy rumbled to life. "From mid-July to September, the department was very active and productive," a former official recalls. "People didn't know how the reorganization would shake out, but at least we had a plan."

Then Katrina struck on Aug. 29. Despite preparations by staffers on all fronts-from weather watchers to emergency response officials to public relations aides-the hurricane threw DHS leadership into turmoil. The response was shocking inside and outside headquarters. Chertoff had pledged publicly that his department would prioritize catastrophic events over all others. He had inherited a brand-new National Re-sponse Plan, created by Ridge's team to give a basic but sturdy framework for responding quickly and effectively to a major disaster. Yet when the moment came to implement the plan, the leadership seized up.

Chertoff did not activate a portion of the plan specifically designed for handling catastrophes, even though some officials say that doing so could have saved lives and brought the chaotic situation in New Orleans under control. Instead, he melted into the background. President Bush, Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, and later the Coast Guard's Adm. Thad Allen instead took the spotlight.

Inside the department, the work that began in earnest after Chertoff's July announcement quickly ground to a halt. "Everything was Katrina for about two months," a former official says. Even after the situation in the Gulf Coast region had calmed, the focus at headquarters was how to reform FEMA-or re-reform FEMA-since Chertoff had targeted it for changes in July.

Unwanted Child

The fault for Homeland Security's stagnation doesn't stop with Chertoff. The Bush administration has neglected homeland security, former officials say, and the department has suffered for it.

The White House created DHS, the largest bureaucracy since the Pentagon, only after Democrats forced it to do so.

Until 2005, it treated the department like an unwanted child, putting it under strict orders not to be an embarrassment, cost more money or ask for favors.

When the spotlight shone on DHS, it highlighted just how poorly designed the new department was.

Neither the White House nor Congress adequately assessed or provided for the herculean task of twisting, forcing and cajoling 22 ill-fitting and at times ill-tempered agencies to act like one organization. That has fallen to a succession of dedicated men and women who, in the absence of actual plans or forethought, have rolled up their sleeves and gone to work.

Unfortunately, rolled-up sleeves aren't enough. Former FEMA chief Michael Brown proved that.

Only recently has Chertoff become an active voice for the department, as the public's attention has shifted away from the Gulf Coast crisis toward other issues.

He has pledged a renewed focus on immigration and border security issues, among other things. But even in those areas DHS has a troubled history, rife with indecision and leadership conflicts that have impeded its efforts.

Those conflicts loom large in the bureaus responsible for overseeing immigration and border security.

Long-standing problems between DHS' bureaus of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection exemplify the management mayhem that dogged Secretary Chertoff in his first year.

War at the Core

CBP is responsible for enforcing immigration and customs laws at and immediately around the nation's borders and ports of entry. ICE is responsible for investigating criminal and terrorist activity and enforcing immigration and customs laws within the interior of the country.

Financial problems at ICE have received widespread congressional and public attention. So has lack of coordination between the two bureaus. Interviews with DHS officials and documents obtained by Government Executive reveal that senior managers knew within weeks of the department's creation that serious problems existed, but they struggled to find solutions.

Former ICE administrator Michael Garcia and former CBP commissioner Robert Bonner were unable to resolve a funding dispute between their agencies, according to the officials and documents. Their boss, Asa Hutchinson, who was DHS undersecretary for Border and Transportation Security, was fully aware of the disagreement.

Garcia declared that his agency had a huge budget shortfall just three months after the department was officially stood up in March 2003. In June 2003, Garcia wrote to Hutchinson saying that up to $500 million should be transferred immediately from CBP to ICE. Bonner fought the transfer of funds to ICE.

"The budget was hugely screwed up," says Andrew Maner, Homeland Security's former chief financial officer, who also served as Bonner's chief of staff when the dispute began. Another budget official, who spoke on background, says Garcia's staff did not produce evidence to verify that CBP owed ICE up to $500 million: "Show me the data that substantiates what you are saying, because you don't move half-a-billion dollars on a whim in one memo."

Hutchinson was unable to mediate the problem. He told Garcia and Bonner to get their staffs together and work out a solution, but nine months later, staffers were at a bitter impasse and ICE-the government's second-largest investigative agency, next to the FBI-was running out of money.

Garcia pleaded for help.

"Since June, ICE and CBP staffs have had numerous meetings with no resolution. Neither has CBP transferred any funds due to ICE," Garcia wrote on March 11, 2004, to Hutchinson and Janet Hale, DHS undersecretary for management. "We need immediate resolution of these funding issues, otherwise ICE will have no choice but to begin curtailment of services provided to both ICE and CBP."

Garcia listed "drastic measures" that his agency would have to take, including cutting back staff operations and support, limiting special operations, and reducing bed space to detain illegal immigrants and criminals.

"Given the magnitude of the shortfall, there is no solution we can implement that would not adversely impact staffing and the ICE mission," Garcia warned Hutchinson and Hale. "In most cases, there is agreement in principle with CBP, but no agreement on the remedy, namely payment to ICE. Accordingly, I respectfully request your assistance in bringing these matters to a quick resolution."

No resolution was reached.

By the end of March 2004, ICE instituted a hiring freeze. In the months that followed, Garcia's other warnings came to fruition: The agency started releasing criminal aliens nationwide because it did not have enough space to detain them, and it implemented restrictions on all nonessential spending. Agents in the field said they did not have money to put gas in their cars, travel for investigations or fully do their work.

With the two agencies unable to resolve the dispute, Homeland Security's budget shop was dragged in. "I did not see [the Border and Transportation Security Directorate] engage at all . . . in trying to resolve this problem. It was all tossed up to the department," says a budget official on background.

"It was a total nightmare," Maner adds.

The DHS budget shop went to work on finding solutions. Weekly meetings turned into daily meetings, auditors were sent around the country, and every account was scrubbed. "There was very little confidence in anything. You had to go through everything with a fine-toothed comb," says one of the officials.

By the end of fiscal 2004, the budget shop had gotten ICE $627 million by reprogramming funds. But it wasn't enough. A DHS source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, says the funding only covered expenses in 2004. Budget shortfalls carried over into 2005 and 2006 due to recurring costs.

Bruised Egos

The department hired Chicago-based consulting firm Grant Thornton LLP in December to examine the ICE and CBP budgets. The firm discovered that ICE had a huge budget shortfall, while CBP had about $460 million in unspent funds.

Grant Thornton found weaknesses in ICE's financial management. The bur-eau was using an antiquated accounting system and did not have enough financial staff. "CBP appears to have the systems, procedures and staff to manage their resources. DHS should figure out some way to share this expertise with ICE."

But the source says Grant Thornton's findings were buried. Rather than transfer CBP's unused funds to ICE, Hale developed a team to come up with another solution. In March 2005, the team proposed to Congress a complex reprogramming of funds among multiple DHS agencies and programs.

Congress rejected the request, and instead gave ICE new money in May 2005 as part of an emergency funding bill to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. ICE's budget also was increased through the fiscal 2006 budget.

When all was said and done, ICE had been given almost $1.6 billion in extra funding by the end of 2005 through internal DHS reprogramming and congressional appropriations. According to the DHS budget shop, ICE is now on solid financial footing-almost three years after Garcia first sounded the alarm bells.

"[There were] a lot of bruised egos, a lot of hard meetings, a lot of cussing and swearing. But it's fixed," Maner says.

An October 2005 ICE budget document shows the agency still is grappling with staffing shortfalls, however. ICE would need about $450 million in new funding to fill more than 2,000 vacant positions, according to the document. About 1,000 are empty in the Office of Investigations.

ICE spokesman Dean Boyd says the agency is evaluating its options and eliminating some vacant positions. He says ICE is staffing new projects, and the fiscal 2007 budget request contains a 21 percent funding increase that would allow more hires.

Garcia left ICE last fall to become U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York; Bonner retired in November. Garcia declined comment. Hutchinson, who left the department to run for Arkansas governor, issued a statement saying he "was pleased with the progress we made on resolving the conflict [between ICE and CBP] even if much work remained to be done upon my departure."

Fumbled Fleet

Caught up in the resource war between ICE and CBP was the office of Air and Marine Operations. Before DHS was created in 2003, AMO was a Customs agency focused largely on drug interdiction missions along the Southwest border, and in the Caribbean and in Latin America. With a fleet of 133 aircraft and 82 vessels, many equipped with sophisticated sensors designed especially for the drug war, and 1,000 employees, half of whom were highly trained pilots or marine and aviation enforcement officers, the agency was integral to ICE operations and a key player in other agencies' counternarcotics operations, as well as in multiagency efforts to secure events deemed to be of national significance-such as the Super Bowl and the presidential inauguration.

But soon after it was rolled into ICE as part of Homeland Security, funding shortfalls resulting from the reorganization quickly began taking a toll. In his June 6, 2003, memo to Hutchinson, Garcia wrote it was "urgent" that $178 million in operations and maintenance funding be transferred from CBP to AMO. By the following spring, the problems had only worsened. In another memo to Hutchinson and Hale on March 11, 2004, Garcia wrote: "The FY 2004 enacted budget simply did not provide ICE with all of the resources from legacy Customs that previously funded the Investigations and Air and Marine Operations programs (acknowledged by CBP) . . . ICE has received neither funding nor [full-time personnel] for mission support for legacy Customs Office of Investigations and Air and Marine Operations ($86.7 million)."

Without intervention from senior department leaders, AMO faced, among other outcomes, "significant staff reductions in both operations and support [and] severely restricted flight hours," Garcia wrote. AMO had begun staffing new offices along the northern border, but those plans quickly ground to a halt, leaving dozens of pilots and staff in flux. A hiring freeze had already put in bureaucratic limbo nearly 100 would-be pilots, some of whom had quit other jobs to accept conditional employment with AMO only to discover that circumstances had changed. A recapitalization plan to modernize aircraft and vessels fell into a deep freeze.

CBP Air

But in September 2004, the impasse between ICE and CBP over AMO funding seemed resolved when Garcia and Bonner jointly announced that AMO would transfer from ICE to CBP, ostensibly because AMO's mission was more in line with that of CBP's. If the money wouldn't come to AMO, then AMO would go to the money.

To members of AMO, the move seemed like good news, at least initially. "We regarded Bonner as a strong leader. Given all the problems we had when we were part of ICE, some of us thought we were finally going to have the resources and the leadership we needed to do our job," says a pilot who asked not to be identified.

With the inclusion of AMO's highly trained workforce and sophisticated interdiction equipment, Bonner, who was increasingly under pressure to improve border security, saw a way to significantly boost surveillance along the borders and to streamline CBP's operations.

In the summer of 2005, he announced that aviation assets from AMO and the Border Patrol would be merged into a new organization, CBP Air. By consolidating training and maintenance and coordinating missions, Bonner and others at DHS saw an opportunity to save money and improve operations.

In January, Bonner's replacement, acting Commissioner Deborah J. Spero, announced a similar merger of the marine side of AMO with the Border Patrol's marine operations to form CBP Air and Marine.

But in October, when Bonner announced details about how the new CBP Air would be structured (a structure now mirrored across the marine side as well), members of the former AMO were disturbed. Under the reorganization, Border Patrol sector chiefs along the northern and southern borders would have tactical control of aviation assets for day-to-day operations. The sector chiefs would be assisted by directors of air operations-former AMO aviators with expertise in aircraft management and maintenance issues.

To at least some former AMO pilots, the idea that senior Border Patrol officials, few with any experience in aviation, would be directing their daily activities was unpalatable. Furthermore, the directors of air operations would receive performance appraisals from the Border Patrol chiefs, a move that some believe could jeopardize pilot safety by putting inappropriate pressure on the directors to meet every request of the sector chiefs, their raters. In addition, the structure emphasizes local priorities of the Border Patrol sector chiefs over broader national security priorities, says a CBP headquarters official formerly with AMO.

"This was a hostile takeover by the Border Patrol," a pilot says, echoing the sentiments of several former AMO pilots reached by Government Executive.

The concerns have found an audience on Capitol Hill. Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, complained in a letter to Chertoff on Oct. 27 that the reorganization left AMO's former customers such as ICE and the Drug Enforcement Administration "forced to carry on without critical assets."

Additionally, he wrote, the new structure "risks compromising other efforts equally critical to our national security." Congress is considering legislation that would take the air assets out of CBP altogether to create a stand-alone air force whose director would report directly to the DHS secretary. In the meantime, Congress is withholding $10 million from CBP Air until the agency produces long-term plans that explain how CBP will effectively use and modernize this new air force.

Crafting the strategic plan and appeasing critics now falls to Michael C. Kostelnik, the assistant commissioner of CBP Air and Marine. Kostelnik, a former Air Force pilot and senior executive at NASA, says change always is difficult, particularly in tradition-bound organizations such as the former Customs Service and the Border Patrol.

His top priorities are to finalize the strategic plan, a modernization plan and a revised air operations manual-essentially the bible for aviation in the new organization. At stake are all policies and regulations governing standards, maintenance, safety, operational procedures, personnel rules and more. Because the Border Patrol and AMO operated very differently, the changes are bound to upset many.

"I'm trying to take the best of each of the legacy approaches," Kostelnik says. "There won't be winners or losers; there will just be one new corporate air force." A senior official at CBP Air who has been highly critical of the merger says he and others are guardedly optimistic about the leadership Kostelnik may bring to an organization that has had more than its share of problems fitting into Homeland Security: "I think that someday this will be a very good place to work."

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Swamped

Justin Rood — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

National Flood Insurance policyholders are left to sink or swim on their own.

Maryland retirees Bill and Dana Davis were awakened by their son in the predawn of Sept. 19, 2003, to flee their home.

Nearby waterways were flooding the area, engorged with rain by Hurricane Isabel, which had hit the day before. The Davises' son, Bill, had stayed up that night in his parents' living room, watching the creek across the street creep closer to the yard, then to the house, then under the door.

The flood did more than $70,000 worth of damage to the Davis home. More than a foot of contaminated water soaked into the floor, walls, heating and air conditioning. Luckily, the Davises were insured through the federal government's National Flood Insurance Program.

Or so they thought.

They didn't foresee that their settlement would cover only a quarter of the flood damage-even though they were insured for more than 10 times that amount. Nor did they know they would have to spend months fighting a tangled public-private bureaucracy to get reimbursed enough to repair their house.

Despite the extensive damage, an insurance adjuster declared that the elderly Davises-Bill was 74, and Dana, 61-were entitled to only about $20,000. The couple repeatedly called their insurance company, New Jersey-based Selective Insurance, to find out why, but got nowhere. "That's when the problem started," says Dana. "We couldn't get answers to anything."

As fall turned into winter, the couple lived in their ruined, moldy, unheated house, trying to get a fair settlement from their flood insurance policy. "We probably shouldn't have" stayed in the house, Dana recalls. "The floodwater was really dirty, contaminated water. But we cleaned up the best we could." The lack of heat, she says stoically, wasn't a big deal. "We wore sweaters."

The Davises weren't alone in their dilemma, although they didn't know it at the time. Thousands of NFIP policyholders have since complained of being shortchanged and poorly treated by a program designed to help them-a program their premiums fund. As insured victims of 2005 hurricanes Katrina and Rita file a record number of claims with NFIP, concern is growing about the program.

Costs Less, Does More?

Created by Congress in 1968, the National Flood Insurance Program has been called "ingenious" for doing so much and costing so little. The program's mission is straightforward: insure properties in flood-prone areas that private companies won't.

NFIP, which is part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is fiscally smart-premiums paid by homeowners cover just about all of the costs of administering the program, including paying claims. In fact, the program actually saves taxpayers money. Every penny it pays out to flood victims takes the place of a federal penny that would have bailed out the same people. That's a lot of pennies: Along with mitigation efforts, the federal government estimates NFIP saves a billion dollars a year in disaster relief payments.

Even the indirect effects of the program are laudable. Because the law requires most people buying property in flood zones to hold an NFIP policy, it discourages people from living in flood-prone areas. And it requires communities to take steps to mitigate flood damage so residents are eligible for flood insurance.

That's if NFIP works as intended. But a Government Executive review of dozens of documents along with conversations with policyholders, watchdog groups and people inside and outside NFIP reveals the program often doesn't work the way it was meant to.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have hit the program hard. To date, policyholders have filed a record $22 billion in damage claims. For a program that has paid out less than $15 billion in its entire 36-year history, the claims deluge is overwhelming.

But most experts say Katrina-related claims won't sink the organization-even though they will far surpass the program's roughly $1 billion in reserves. Congress will have little choice but to appropriate more money to cover Katrina claims. "I think Congress will write off most of that debt," says Douglas J. Elliott, president and founder of the Washington-based fiscal watchdog Center on Federal Financial Institutions. "Congress isn't going to want to force the insured to come up with the money."

But NFIP also faces problems largely of its own devising: It has hindered policy- holders hit by floods from receiving payouts they deserve. A multibillion-dollar suit has been filed against the program by policyholders who say they've been shorted. As evidence of mismanagement and wasteful spending mounts, powerful senators, the Homeland Security Department's inspector general and other government investigators are increasing their scrutiny of the program.

After Hurricane Isabel had passed, The Davises shared their frustrations with their neighbors, the Kanstorooms, who also had difficulty wresting a fair payment from their insurance company. The husband, Steve, offered to help the Davises get a fair settlement. The Kanstorooms offered to let the Davises live in their home until repairs were completed.

Steve Kanstoroom went to work, haranguing insurance companies, FEMA officials and politicians. He talked to other families that had been shortchanged by FEMA. And he researched NFIP with meticulous earnestness, memorizing the smallest details of the program.

NFIP is an unusual animal of federal bureaucracy. When it was created in 1968, Congress decreed it should be "carried out to the maximum extent practicable by the private insurance industry." It was an early example of outsourcing: Scores of salespeople from private insurance companies sell and service identical, government-backed flood policies. Meanwhile, a handful of government bureaucrats oversee the program.

With minor tinkering, the program's structure is largely the same today as it was then. Ninety-five insurance companies sell and service NFIP policies. About 100 employees at Computer Sciences Corp., the El Segundo, Calif.-based defense and homeland security contracting giant, administer NFIP, processing premiums and damage claims. (To help handle Katrina-related claims, CSC has brought on 45 temporary staff members.) Meanwhile, 40 FEMA employees oversee the program.

In the Davis case, Kanstoroom discovered that the insurance company's adjuster had used the wrong set of figures to calculate the cost of repairs. In addition, the adjuster omitted several significant pieces of damage. The errors accounted for the discrepancy between the adjuster's assessment and what contractors found.

Lessons From Isabel

Mistakes like this constitute evidence of conspiracy, according to 140 Marylanders who last June filed suit in federal court charging acting NFIP Director David I. Maurstad of systematically lowballing damage assessments on flooded homes and using high-pressure tactics to force policyholders to accept lower payments. "As a result, these families are being destroyed," Martin Freeman, a lawyer representing the group, told The Washington Post last June. They are seeking $2 billion in damages. Maurstad declined further comment on the lawsuit because it was still in progress.

After months of back-and-forth with the insurance company and FEMA, the Davises finally received payment in full. "If it wasn't for Steve Kanstoroom, I don't know what would have happened," Dana Davis recalls. Hundreds, even thousands of families could soon find that out. Now, NFIP's team of 40 is overseeing the payment of claims expected to reach almost $30 billion, three-quarters of the Homeland Security Department's annual budget. Maurstad says his team is up to the task. "It's a pretty efficient operation," he says. "It needs to be." Others have reservations.

"Regrettably, I have had experience dealing with FEMA and the National Flood Insurance Program over the past two years," Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D-Md., told Maurstad at a hearing last October. "Given these interactions, I am very deeply concerned about FEMA's ability to handle not only flood insurance claims, but the other needs of the people affected by hurricanes Katrina and Rita."

After Hurricane Isabel, the program failed to properly compensate hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Maryland policyholders. Responding to public outcry, FEMA belatedly established a process to review damage assessments. It found that NFIP had shorted close to half of those who had filed for an assessment review.

Maurstad says concerns that NFIP will repeat its post-Isabel mistakes are unfounded. "There were a lot of reasons for difficulties with Isabel," he says. "It was the first significant flooding event Maryland had had in a number of years. I think there were agents that were caught off guard. Policyholders' expectations didn't match the limitations in the policy."

The program has improved since then, he says. "We changed some of the information we provided, [and] we provided additional information to help people file their claim." The results are clear, he says: NFIP has successfully closed more than 98 percent of claims from the 2004 hurricane season. With more than 74,000 claims, it was the program's worst year, until Katrina.

Kanstoroom, who since helping the Davises has become a one-man, self-funded watchdog to the flood insurance program, disagrees. " 'Closed' doesn't mean 'fairly settled,' " he says. He asserts that many adjusters and carriers warn victims that their files will be closed if they contest their settlements. "With a gun to their heads, the victims sign off, and NFIP considers the claim closed." Kanstoroom says he has interviewed "thousands" of flood victims about NFIP, many of whom found him through his Web site, www.femainfo.us.

The special NFIP review after Isabel found more than 1,000 victims-5 percent of all claims-had been shorted. Kanstoroom believes the actual figure is much higher. Many insured flood victims didn't hear of the review, he says, because NFIP contractor CSC mailed notices of the review to abandoned properties.

Others did not suspect adjusters had made mistakes. "Most people thought that their adjuster was a government official, so they had no reason to doubt," explains Kanstoroom.

There were other problems, too. Operators at a CSC-run call center set up to handle review inquiries didn't always give callers good information; Kanstoroom says they were poorly trained. As well, the operators informed policyholders at the beginning of each call that if their claim was reviewed, it could result in their damage estimate being lowered, not raised. "In many cases, the call ended right there," he says.

Maurstad declines to respond to Kanstoroom's concerns. "Mr. Kanstoroom is advising the law firms that are suing NFIP, and so I'm really not in a position to comment," he says.

Kanstoroom says that when asked, he has provided information to a number of lawyers and plaintiffs suing FEMA over problems with flood insurance and has never received money to do so.

'Go to Court'

Despite the problems with the Isabel review board, it was a first. Until then, NFIP policyholders' only option was to sue in federal court, an expensive proposition that bore little fruit. Damages are capped so a claimant can win only their correctly adjusted damage amount. "Attorneys tell victims that they're better off settling now than fighting it in court and paying legal fees," says Kanstoroom.

Some don't follow that advice. Texas lawyer Christopher Leonard represented a client whose property was destroyed by floods in 2001 and felt her insurance company had shorted her by more than $50,000. By law, however, NFIP pays for insurance companies-in Leonard's case, Allstate-to defend against such suits. Allstate hired a team of lawyers, led by Gerald Nielsen, a Louisiana lawyer who is the legal giant of NFIP and represents all 95 insurance companies that write NFIP policies. Leonard estimates Allstate spent $150,000 of NFIP's money fighting his client's claim.

In the end, they won. And since NFIP covered Allstate's legal bills, Leonard's client had the dissatisfaction of knowing her premiums had paid for some small part of Allstate's victory. Company spokesman Mike Siemienas says Allstate does not disclose attorneys fees. When asked about defending Allstate against Leonard, Nielsen says, "I'm not at liberty to discuss particular matters of litigation."

In an effort to help policyholders resolve disputes without going to such lengths, Congress ordered FEMA in 2004 to develop a formal appeals process to handle complaints from policyholders and set a Dec. 30, 2004, deadline for completion. To date, there is no appeals process.

"We're doing all we can to get [appeals processes] in place as quickly as we can," Maurstad says. "I try not to make excuses," he adds, "but the president signed the [bill] on June 30, 2004, and less than 60 days later we headed into what was at the time the worst hurricane season FEMA had had to deal with and the largest number of claims we've ever had.

"That carried into 2005, and then of course we've had the hurricane season," he continues. "The scope of these events is beyond anything in the history of our country. They've taken time and resources to deal with the response and recovery. That needs to be considered."

That explanation goes down easier in the dry comfort of a congressional hearing room than in the moldy ruins of a former home. In Chalmette, La., Lisa Wilkes' two-unit rental house was flooded with more than 7 feet of water from Hurricane Katrina. One adjuster told her the top floor was fine, but the bottom floor was "totaled," and the damage assessment would reflect that. "I said, 'How will you repair upstairs if downstairs is totaled?' She said she wasn't sure, she didn't know how they did that."

Wilkes disputed that assessment with Allstate, to no avail. She received the correct settlement only after writing letters to her state attorney general and insurance commissioner about the matter-and sending copies to the insurance company. In January, four months after her home was destroyed, she received a check for the full cost of her house's damage. Allstate's Siemienas says the company could not comment on Wilkes' case because it could not locate the paperwork.

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Swarming Information

Justin Rood — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Lessons from a rare example of information-sharing success and a spontaneous grass-roots response to disaster could hold a novel recipe for transforming the intelligence community.

In 2003, CIA veteran John Brennan took on one of the biggest challenges of his career: getting members of the so-called intelligence "community" to work together on the terrorist threat by standing up the all-source, all-agency Terrorist Threat Integration Center. To succeed, he had to get warring national security fiefdoms -- the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the FBI, the State Department and others -- to share intelligence and personnel.

Brennan linked his center's computer to the databases from all the three-letter agencies, giving his analysts direct access to more intelligence than any other federal organization in history. The center's real success came from those analysts. Although they came from organizations that have battled to control turf and information, inside the center they worked side-by-side without incident, sharing information and collaborating on analysis.

"Within [the center], I never had an instance of institutional rivalry," recalls Brennan, who retired from TTIC -- since renamed the National Counterterrorism Center -- in August 2005. "Your badge designating you as CIA or FBI or DoD quickly becomes irrelevant as you come together to work in a collaborative environment."

"I wish I could take credit," says Brennan, now a private consultant to government counterterrorism programs. "But if you put people together, give them a very important mission and give them more information than they've ever had access to, chemistry develops."

Brennan might be modest - but he's also on to something. "If you move below the executive level to the analysts who do the work . . . they can figure this [information-sharing] stuff out on their own," says Randy Pherson, a former career CIA analyst who now trains FBI analysts and consults with the Homeland Security Department's intelligence operations. "The little guy knows more about what he's trying to do than the big guy."

High Stakes

Indeed, high stakes seem to bring out the best in people. Less than two hours after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast 0n Aug. 29, for example, volunteers had set up a "wiki" -- an open, collaborative online tool -- to be a central repository for information to help survivors find aid and volunteers to provide it.

As officials struggled to straighten out their bureaucratic hierarchies, the Hurricane Katrina Help Wiki (www.katrinahelp.info) quickly became a more comprehensive source of information than any government outlet, helping tens of thousands of people use dozens of largely uncoordinated public and private efforts to save themselves and their pets, find food and shelter, and locate loved ones. Thousands contributed information updated postings and made corrections.

To be sure, the wiki was an even more radical experiment than Brennan's center: There was no Brennan to run it. The handful of organizers were facilitators, not directors. They couldn't order people to participate or point to a White House directive for authority. They had little control over the site or its contributors. Yet the result was stunning.

Such self-organizing collaborations -- "swarms," as they've come to be called -- are in some cases more effective, efficient and resilient than other organizations, researchers have found. Responsibility is shared, participants feel more invested and oversight is spread to the edges of the group instead of hoarded at the top. Still, their success is something of a mystery.

"The system works, but sometimes you can't really explain why it works and how it works," says Eric Bonabeau, a Cambridge, Mass.-based researcher and consultant to the public and private sectors, who has studied the phenomenon. "Its behavior is the result of myriad interactions." Bonabeau has co-authored two books on the subject, Intelligence Collective (Hermès Sciences, Paris, 1994) and Swarm Intelligence (Oxford University Press, 1999).

For the system to work in government and business, managers must let go, he says, and few executives (in government, especially) are willing to embrace a solution they can neither completely control nor explain, even for intractable problems. "Managers would rather live with a problem they can't solve than with a solution they don't understand," Bonabeau says.

A government executive's aversion to the swarm approach might be as prudent as it is conservative. Throwing a group of people into a room and telling them to solve a problem holds little appeal to someone who might have to testify before Congress if the effort fails.

On the flip side, removing "ownership" is part of what might make swarms work, particularly interagency collaborations such as Brennan's center. "Ownership implies hierarchy implies authority, which implies command over resources," says former CIA analyst Pherson. "Most of that doesn't work for [information-sharing]."

Sharing intelligence isn't the only information challenge facing the national security community. Despite efforts by the FBI, Homeland Security and others, there is no effective system for passing data and analysis among local, state and federal agencies involved in counterterrorism, nor for sharing it with the private sector.

The most recent attempt, the top-heavy federal Homeland Security Information Network, is collapsing under its own weight, according to news accounts. Created as a system for informally sharing tips, questions and information at all levels -- from city cops to federal intelligence analysts -- the network now is used mainly by DHS to broadcast information that state and local recipients say is of little use.

Communities of Interest

In Pherson's schema, the thousands of people who should participate in HSIN -- local law enforcement officers, security staff at factories and power plants, bank security personnel, state homeland security officials, emergency managers and more -- would form communities of interest, using something as simple as an e-mail listserve.

For example, a security official for a Houston oil refinery might belong to a community for refineries, another for the Houston area and perhaps one for port security. It would be up each official to join the most useful groups.

The result, predicts Pherson, would be an overlapping network of networks that would quickly and efficiently circulate information not only up and down the local-state-federal ladder, but around and among users, public or private sector. The system is smarter about sharing, and protecting, information, Pherson says, because "you're imposing human brain filters at every step of the way."

In November 2004, Congress assigned the director of national intelligence to create a networked "trusted environment" in which intelligence agencies can share information and work together. The effort, has been slow in starting up, and its first act -- creating what amounts to an online phone book of the intelligence world so specialists can find their counterparts -- was both necessary and alarmingly rudimentary.

Could self-organizing collaborative communities then grow organically from that? Skeptics say no.

"Folks in the intelligence community aren't in the same gene pool as folks who are doing self-organizing, joining things," says Linda Millis, head of the Markle Foundation's National Security Program. Her group has proposed a complex information-sharing system, known as the SHARE Network, which served as the basis for legislators' instructions to the director of national intelligence.

With two decades of intelligence experience, Millis reflects the thinking of many seasoned veterans and senior officials. And perhaps they are right -- although Brennan's success argues otherwise. If doubters are correct, then even the most sophisticated network in the world won't fix the information-sharing problem. And who will explain that to a Congress and America next time the system fails?

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Swarming Information

Justin Rood — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

To net terrorists, abandon bureaucracy.

The now infamous failure of national security agencies to share information that might have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks led Congress, the White House and the organizations themselves to attempt major changes. But for the most part, those reforms have been plagued by familiar problems: turf wars, slow-moving bureaucracy and a perception that the compartmented nature of intelligence work precludes collaboration.

Lessons from a rare example of information-sharing success and a spontaneous grass-roots response to disaster could hold a novel recipe for transforming the intelligence community.

In 2003, CIA veteran John Brennan took on one of the biggest challenges of his career: getting members of the so-called intelligence "community" to work together on the terrorist threat by standing up the all-source, all-agency Terrorist Threat Integration Center. To succeed, he had to get warring national security fiefdoms-the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the FBI, the State Department and others-to share intelligence and personnel.

"Within [the center], I never had an instance of institutional rivalry," recalls Brennan, who retired from TTIC-since renamed the National Counterterrorism Center-in August 2005. "Your badge designating you as CIA or FBI or DoD quickly becomes irrelevant as you come together to work in a collaborative environment."

Brennan might be modest-but he's also on to something. "If you move below the executive level to the analysts who do the work . . . they can figure this [information-sharing] stuff out on their own," says Randy Pherson, a former career CIA analyst who now trains FBI analysts and consults with the Homeland Security Department's intelligence operations. "The little guy knows more about what he's trying to do than the big guy."

High Stakes

Indeed, high stakes seem to bring out the best in people. Less than two hours after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast 0n Aug. 29, for example, volunteers had set up a "wiki"-an open, collaborative online tool-to be a central repository for information to help survivors find aid and volunteers to provide it.

Such self-organizing collaborations-"swarms," as they've come to be called-are in some cases more effective, efficient and resilient than other organizations, researchers have found. Responsibility is shared, participants feel more invested and oversight is spread to the edges of the group instead of hoarded at the top. Still, their success is something of a mystery.

The most recent attempt, the top-heavy federal Homeland Security Information Network, is collapsing under its own weight, according to news accounts. Created as a system for informally sharing tips, questions and information at all levels-from city cops to federal intelligence analysts-the network now is used mainly by DHS to broadcast information that state and local recipients say is of little use.

Communities of Interest

What better to replace a failing top-down bureaucratic methodology than a networked anti-bureaucratic one? Pherson has hatched just such an approach. He calls it "Agile Global Intelligence Network of Networks." In Pherson's schema, the thousands of people who should participate in HSIN-local law enforcement officers, security staff at factories and power plants, bank security personnel, state homeland security officials, emergency managers and more-would form communities of interest, using something as simple as an e-mail listserve. For example, a security official for a Houston oil refinery might belong to a community for refineries, another for the Houston area and perhaps one for port security. It would be up each official to join the most useful groups.

In November 2004, Congress assigned the director of national intelligence to create a networked "trusted environment" in which intelligence agencies can share information and work together. The effort, has been slow in starting up, and its first act-creating what amounts to an online phone book of the intelligence world so specialists can find their counterparts-was both necessary and alarmingly rudimentary.

Could self-organizing collaborative communities then grow organically from that? Skeptics say no. "Folks in the intelligence community aren't in the same gene pool as folks who are doing self-organizing, joining things," says Linda Millis, head of the Markle Foundation's National Security Program. Her group has proposed a complex information-sharing system, known as the SHARE Network, that served as the basis for legislators' instructions to the director of national intelligence.

With two decades of intelligence experience, Millis reflects the thinking of many seasoned veterans and senior officials. And perhaps they are right-although Brennan's success argues otherwise. If doubters are correct, then even the most sophisticated network in the world won't fix the information-sharing problem. And who will explain that to a Congress and America next time the system fails?

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Getting Serious

Justin Rood — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The new intelligence chief for the Homeland Security Department, Allen - who spent 47 very good years at the CIA - is standing in the press gallery of DHS' Nebraska Avenue complex in Washington, where the podium has become a makeshift portrait studio. DHS is asking Allen to change his ways - on the day of the shoot, he was scheduled for back-to-back interviews.

But his real task will be to change the department and its intelligence operations, which have suffered from weak leadership and meager resources since their creation three years ago. Can he do it?

"I can't think of a better person" for the chief intelligence officer job, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., told Allen at an October hearing. "I think you are a change agent. If somebody can get in there and get their arms around it, I believe it's you. We're counting on you to do the right thing there."

Allen's tenacity and longevity made him something of a legend within the CIA. Even in his fifth decade of service to the agency, he kept the hours of a person half his age. "Charlie was in every day before 6 a.m., and he didn't leave until 8 at night," says John Gannon, a former senior CIA official who served alongside Allen. Gannon should know: The two men parked their cars in the same CIA lot reserved for top officials.

As one admirer gushed to U.S. News and World Report last year, "If you don't think you're getting your money's worth out of the federal government, look at Charlie Allen."

In 1985, Allen was the first within the CIA to surmise that Oliver North was using the agency to do more than free U.S. hostages in Iran, and probably was funneling ill-gotten gains to fund the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. In 1991, Allen warned of Saddam Hussein's "surprise" invasion of Kuwait. And in 2002, he pressed the agency to go to extra lengths to determine the truth about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programs, including interrogating relatives of Saddam's scientists.

"You could disagree with Charlie on issues, on the way he relentlessly drove them - and I certainly have in my time - but look at [his record] over a period of years," says Gannon, who is now a vice president for global analysis at BAE Systems.

Allen hasn't always been right, of course. He also has been catastrophically wrong. In 1973, he reviewed intelligence showing Egypt and Syria running military exercises along the Israeli border and decided it was a bluff. He wrote as much in the President's Daily Brief that went to Richard Nixon. Shortly thereafter, the two countries invaded Israel, launching the Yom Kippur War.

"I was seared by that experience," Allen says. "I swore I would always work a lot harder in re-examining my assumptions and views." That blunder plays a large part in what motivates him to be a "pile driver," as Gannon characterizes him.

Allen also has ordered up a new enterprise architecture so departments can more easily share information, and started drawing up a strategic plan to remake his division. The plan, he says, will include specific deliverables, timelines and performance metrics (unlike Secretary Michael Chertoff's overhaul plans for DHS, announced in July). The first draft is due in a month.

Allen also has convened a new Homeland Security Intelligence Council, comprising the top intelligence officials from each DHS division, which will meet regularly to resolve thorny information-sharing problems and will keep the department's far-flung components - such as the Transportation Security Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Coast Guard - from forgetting the front office's intelligence needs.

Soon after it was created, the White House stripped it of its original mission - to be an all-source intelligence analysis shop hunting for clues of the next terrorist attack. Thus, Allen has little influence over any intelligence products but DHS' own, and little say in assigning intelligence collectors outside the department.

He's also adding a touch of creative repackaging by floating the notion of his product as "Homeland Security intelligence." He hopes "HSINT" could compete with the traditional INTs - human intelligence (HUMINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT) and others - in the minds of policymakers.

"Everyone here understands human intelligence, signals intelligence, imagery intelligence and the other INTs," Allen told the congressional panel in October. His goal, he said, "is to see that Homeland Security intelligence . . . takes its place among the other kinds of intelligence as an indispensable tool for securing the nation."

Allen's changes may or may not make DHS intelligence respectable to policymakers and intelligence colleagues. But given the state of the nation's other intelligence agencies, if he can do the things he wants to do - coordinate collection, tighten up information-sharing, improve analysis - then the odds are in his favor.

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Getting Serious

Justin Rood — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Charlie Allen is repackaging Homeland Security intelligence to boost the department's reputation.

"We didn't do this sort of thing at the CIA," Charlie Allen mutters good-naturedly as he poses for a photographer, trying to ignore a strobe light flashing less than a yard from his face. The new intelligence chief for the Homeland Security Department, Allen-who spent 47 very good years at the CIA-is standing in the press gallery of DHS' Nebraska Avenue complex in Washington, where the podium has become a makeshift portrait studio. DHS is asking Allen to change his ways-on the day of the shoot, he was scheduled for back-to-back interviews. But his real task will be to change the department and its intelligence operations, which have suffered from weak leadership and meager resources since their creation three years ago. Can he do it?

As one admirer gushed to U.S. News and World Report last year, "If you don't think you're getting your money's worth out of the federal government, look at Charlie Allen."

In 1985, Allen was the first within the CIA to surmise that Oliver North was using the agency to do more than free U.S. hostages in Iran, and probably was funneling ill-gotten gains to fund the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. In 1990, Allen warned of Saddam Hussein's "surprise" invasion of Kuwait. And in 2002, he pressed the agency to go to extra lengths to determine the truth about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programs, including interrogating relatives of Saddam's scientists.

"You could disagree with Charlie on issues, on the way he relentlessly drove them-and I certainly have in my time-but look at [his record] over a period of years," says Gannon, who is now a vice president for global analysis at BAE Systems.

Only weeks into his new job at DHS, Allen already is getting down to business. He has reorganized his staff and fired off a memo to DHS Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson requesting more and better facilities and resources. Allen also has ordered up a new enterprise architecture so departments can more easily share information, and started drawing up a strategic plan to remake his division. The plan, he says, will include specific deliverables, timelines and performance metrics (unlike Secretary Michael Chertoff's overhaul plans for DHS, announced in July). The first draft is due in a month.

Allen also has convened a new Homeland Security Intelligence Council, comprising the top intelligence officials from each DHS division, which will meet regularly to resolve thorny information-sharing problems and will keep the department's far-flung components-such as the Transportation Security Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Coast Guard-from forgetting the front office's intelligence needs.

It's clear Allen is serious about changing the intelligence division, now re-named the Office of Intelligence. That's a good thing: Approaching its third birthday, DHS' intelligence shop has become a joke so old it's no longer funny. Soon after it was created, the White House stripped it of its original mission-to be an all-source intelligence analysis shop hunting for clues of the next terrorist attack. Thus, Allen has little influence over any intelligence products but DHS' own, and little say in assigning intelligence collectors outside the department.

Rather than fight another losing battle with others in the administration, Allen appears to be tightening up his own ship, making sure the department collects, shares and analyzes intelligence to the best of its ability. He's also adding a touch of creative repackaging by floating the notion of his product as "Homeland Security intelligence." He hopes "HSINT" could compete with the traditional INTs -human intelligence (HUMINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT) and others- in the minds of policymakers.

Allen's changes may or may not make DHS intelligence respectable to policymakers and intelligence colleagues. But given the state of the nation's other intelligence agencies, if he can do the things he wants to do-coordinate collection, tighten up information-sharing, improve analysis-then the odds are in his favor.

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Medical Catastrophe

Justin Rood — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 00:00:00 -0500

No one's in charge, the plan's incomplete and resources aren't sufficient if we suffer mass casualties in an overwhelming disaster.

As the White House and Congress grow increasingly alarmed over the possibility of a deadly flu pandemic and scramble to spend billions on vaccines, health experts say the United States is incapable of delivering mass care. For evidence, they say, look no further than the bumbling efforts to help victims of Hurricane Katrina.

In the weeks following Katrina, Americans helplessly watched the news accounts of patients suffering in flooded hospitals, waiting for an evacuation too late in coming. Outside the disaster zone, government doctors stood by hundreds of empty cots, watching for patients who never arrived. Paltry resources were predeployed. Experts fear that sick and injured victims died for lack of timely care. The problems stemmed from a lack of planning and preparation, experts say. And they pale in comparison to what would happen if the government had to respond to a pandemic or other catastrophe.

The difference between a catastrophe and a disaster is crucial: State and local officials can be counted on to assess their needs and direct federal response to a disaster. A catastrophe, however, over-whelms state and local governments and requires a federal response that anticipates needs instead of waiting for requests from below.

A classified government plan on how to respond to a catastrophe-the first ever, according to several sources-was drafted in 2003, but despite numerous revisions it never has been approved by all agencies involved.

Thus the federal government remains without a comprehensive plan to handle the injuries and sickness resulting from a "mass casualty incident," such as a major terrorist attack, an epidemic, or an earthquake. In fact, it's not even clear which government agency is in charge of mounting a coordinated medical response to a catastrophe. The Homeland Security and the Health and Human Services departments are each identified as the lead response agency by a conflicting knot of laws, presidential orders and planning documents. What's more, the two do not have a history of working well together.

Medical response to Katrina tells the tale, observers say. "Lack of coordination, lack of adequate supplies," says Dr. Elin Gursky, a public health and disaster response expert, listing the hallmarks of the medical response failures she observed by reading news accounts and talking to doctors involved. "Inadequate forethought," she adds. She pauses on the last item, considering her words carefully: "Possibly preventable mortality."

Those same results could be expected from the federal government's response to an avian flu pandemic, she says. Most of the basic functions of a medical response-making room in hospitals, triaging casualties, coping with mass mortality-are the same for both, or for a terrorist attack. "We're no more prepared for a pandemic outbreak than we were for Katrina," Gursky says.

Where Were the Feds?

A medical volunteer, Dr. Clyde Martin, a Tennessee doctor, spent several days after Katrina hit waiting for the Louisiana government to assign him to a response team. They never called, so he signed up with a private outfit. "I didn't see anybody from Health and Human Services, I didn't see anybody from the Louisiana Department of Health," he says. Martin spent a week in southern Louisiana parishes treating hundreds of patients as part of the private relief effort.

Riding in a friend's pickup truck, Martin saw patients and delivered medicines in New Orleans and three parishes north of the city. Those working alongside him were almost all locals, and the supplies they used were donated by private citizens and organizations. Both people and supplies were stretched beyond their limits, Martin says: "Surely, they [federal responders] were somewhere, but I didn't see anybody in all those places I was."

At the same time, doctors working in federal response elsewhere didn't see a single patient. Dr. Laurence Grummer-Strawn, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researcher and an HHS Public Health Service member, was deployed to central Louisiana with a team of 125 medical personnel to construct a temporary 1,000-bed hospital. The plan, Grummer-Strawn understood, was for that facility to treat "overflow patients" transferred from hospitals in the southern part of the state.

Arriving Saturday, Sept. 3, six days after Katrina hit, his team spent two days setting up the hospital before they were told they weren't needed there. The team left Alexandria, La., Wednesday-it took a day to pack up the beds and equipment-and fanned out to conduct needs assessments at shelters across the state.

Dr. Gerald Parker, the deputy chief of HHS' emergency response office, says despite never seeing a patient, the effort was effective. "In hindsight, it's very easy to criticize and find fault in some decisions that were made to deploy to some certain location," he says. "When you look at it in the whole . . . we had the flexibility to . . . redeploy assets and get them to where the patients were."

When told of Martin's private efforts to give aid, Parker refers to a recent news report of other volunteer doctors who came to the region and weren't used. "[They were] getting in the way of . . . needs being met," he says. "[They were] putting more burden on the system, as opposed to needs being met."

'We Have a Plan'

The federal government has planned for a catastrophe that overwhelms states' resources; the guidelines are included in an attachment to DHS' National Response Plan. A massive document hammered out by agencies to determine who will be in charge of what in the event of a disaster, the NRP is what government officials point to when they say, "We have a plan."

The six-page, bulleted attachment anticipates the failure of states and cities to cope, and directs federal agencies to deploy assets they believe are needed despite the lack of information from an affected state. "The response capabilities and resources of the local jurisdiction may be insufficient and quickly overwhelmed," states the document, known as the Catastrophic Incident Annex.

"Federal support must be provided in a timely manner to save lives, prevent human suffering and mitigate severe damage. This may require mobilizing and deploying assets before they are requested via normal NRP protocols." To underscore the point, the annex reiterates: "The [federal-state] coordination process should not delay or impede the rapid mobilization and deployment of critical federal resources."

The annex is brief, giving only cursory guidance to officials facing a catastrophe-a comprehensive plan is on the way, it says. No government official or agency contacted by Government Executive could confirm that the plan has since been approved. The Homeland Security Department could not confirm that the guidance in this annex was ever implemented as part of its response to Katrina.

Who's in Charge?

Which agency is responsible for planning for and responding to a medical catastrophe depends on who you ask. According to Congress, DHS is in charge. The Homeland Security Act, passed in 2002, puts the department at the helm of all disaster-related efforts, including medical response and preparedness. President Bush, however, thinks otherwise: In 2004 he gave Health and Human Services the lead to develop response plans for bioterror attacks, with an edict known as Homeland Security Presidential Directive 10.

If that wasn't confusing enough, the NRP does little to clarify the roles of the two agencies. It says FEMA (part of DHS) has the lead in responding to all disasters of any type. The medical aspect of the response will be led by Health and Human Services. HHS, however, has few assets to mount a medical response. For example, the National Disaster Medical System-a network of thousands of doctors, veterinarians, nurses, morticians and others who have volunteered to respond to disasters, formed geographic teams, trained and stockpiled equipment and supplies-moved to FEMA when DHS was created.

The NRP therefore foresees the federal medical response unfolding in this way: When a state requests federal aid, FEMA takes the lead in the government's response. It then turns to HHS to lead its medical efforts. HHS then turns back to FEMA to order it to deploy its medical personnel. It is not clear how and when HHS deploys its own assets, including the nation's largest cache of pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, known as the Strategic National Stockpile, controlled by CDC, and the nation's only standing civilian federal medical responders, the 6,000-member Public Health Service. Nor is it clear how it coordinates that with FEMA.

The agencies themselves are reluctant to explain how the NRP process works. Spokesmen from HHS and FEMA at first referred questions to the other agency. After repeated inquiries to both agencies, HHS made available Parker, the No. 2 official in its office of public health and emergency preparedness. "The request originates at the local level, state level, through an action request form," Parker explains. "That request form goes to FEMA," which forwards it to HHS. Health and Human Services then contacts the federal agency that controls the asset the state or local government needs, he says.

But Parker says it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes HHS employees on the ground in the affected area note a need and inform HHS headquarters without going through FEMA. At other times FEMA receives a request and forwards it directly to Defense or another agency to respond directly. Sometimes FEMA deploys its own assets without asking HHS; at times HHS deploys its own assets without consulting FEMA.

"In the end of the day, all those movements have our visibility," Parker says, explaining that HHS knows where all the assets are. "We have our daily [situation reports], we have daily information on all the . . . deployments."

Not so, according to the supervising medical officer for NDMS teams in Louisiana. "I've never seen such poor coordination between federal agencies," says Dr. Susan Briggs, a surgeon at Harvard Medical School. "Simple things were not told to us," she recalls, such as what other medical teams were operating in their vicinity. "That's what a coordinating group is supposed to do."

Briggs, who helped build the NDMS system in the mid-1980s, said the medical response to Katrina was the worst she had seen in 20 years.

In Washington, observers and former staff members confirm privately that coordination between the two agencies has been lacking. The assistant secretary for HHS' Public Health Emergency Preparedness Office, Stewart Simonson, refused for months to meet with former DHS Secretary Tom Ridge's chief medical adviser, Dr. Jeffrey Lowell, according to several sources. Neither Lowell nor Simonson were available for comment. Parker, Simonson's second-in-command, says he would characterize the relationship between DHS and HHS as "good."

Simonson has come under fire for lacking experience. A former Amtrak lawyer, he was given the post by former HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson in 2004. Simonson had more experience as an aide to Thompson than as a health and disaster preparedness manager. "He's the Mike Brown of HHS," Jerome Hauer-Simonson's predecessor-told CQ Homeland Security on Oct. 11. Democrats and others have labeled him a crony and a political hack.

Lowell, who informed his superiors in January of the troubled relationship between DHS and HHS, left his post in February. Despite his efforts, coordination between the two agencies appears not to have improved greatly. The new chief medical officer for DHS, Dr. Jeffrey Runge, told the Associated Press in late September that he would like to create a network of trained volunteers to respond to disasters. But the Surgeon General's Office at HHS has been operating just such a program, the Medical Reserve Corps, since 2002.

"Jeff was not aware that we had already done that at HHS," says Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona, who oversees the corps. The two have since talked about how to "combine our efforts," Carmona says. DHS did not make Runge available for comment.

Short of People and Supplies

Even with plans and responsibilities established, some say catastrophic medical response still would be inadequate: The United States simply doesn't have the medical personnel to attend to large numbers of casualties, or the means to distribute supplies needed to provide care to thousands of sick or injured.

According to the January study by Lowell, the National Disaster Medical System cannot adequately respond to mass casualty events, find beds for the sick and injured or manage a quarantine, which could be required during a pandemic.The all-volunteer NDMS is no longer capable of supporting the new demands placed on the system, Lowell told DHS leadership, according to sources familiar with his findings. He also found that the NDMS teams often are deployed without being prepared. The system was "pretty much shot" trying to respond to Katrina and Rita, Lowell told the Associated Press in September.

To be able to respond to a catastrophe, Lowell recommended DHS develop a highly trained medical reserve corps, on the model of the National Guard, complete with rank and uniform. Lowell's report, stamped "For Official Use Only," never has been made public.

Trained medical personnel are important, but so are supplies and medicine. The Strategic National Stockpile is a $400 million program to make sure medical response to a disaster does not fail for lack of vaccines, antibiotics, and other medicines and equipment. The effort to amass those supplies and deliver them-a 747-full can be "pushed" anywhere in the United States within 24 hours-has been celebrated, but it does only half the job. The states are required to distribute the medicines to their affected areas, and that hasn't gone so smoothly. A 2004 study by the nonprofit Trust for America's Health found that 44 states are incapable of quickly and effectively breaking down pallets of supplies and delivering them to responders.

According to the 2004 study, Louisiana is one of the six states supposedly capable of distributing SNS supplies. Florida and Illinois also are capable, according to the report; the other three states are not identified. Recent events might cause revisions.

In New Orleans, Clyde Martin ran out of vaccines for police officers working in the flooded city. After trying in vain to obtain them through official channels, he called doctor friends back home in Athens, Tenn., who raided supply closets at their hospitals. A local Tennessee rescue team brought the medicine to New Orleans for him before supplies from the strategic stockpile ever arrived. "SNS had been activated almost a week before," Martin says incredulously. "What the hell happened to the SNS?"

Handwriting on the Wall

Even if sufficient national medical emergency plans were in place, experts warn of gross deficits in the nation's ability to cope with large numbers of casualties. Now, the job of transporting the sick and injured from a disaster area falls to the Pentagon's Transportation Command. Planners worry that relying on assets normally used for supporting Defense efforts might be unwise, particularly in a time of escalating military involvement around the world.

"Any time you're planning on using the Department of Defense for anything . . . you have the risk of putting together a system where you can't rely on the asset," says Dr. Joseph Barbera, a consultant to HHS' emergency response office. "It's a balancing act," says Lt. Col. Scott D. Ross, spokesman for the Transportation Command. So far, he says, U.S. Transportation Command has met the needs of both civil support and the war on terrorism.

Another worry is the ability of hospitals to absorb thousands of casualties. At present, most hospitals operate at or near capacity. In major cities, it's not unusual to find patient beds in hallways, says Dr. Arthur Kellerman, the head of Emory University's emergency medicine department in Atlanta. Evacuees from Hurricane Katrina put intense stress on his city's emergency rooms and doctors. He worries about what hospitals would do if they were forced to absorb hundreds or thousands of seriously ill or injured from an attack or natural catastrophe.

Pietro "Peter" Marghella retired as chief medical planner for the Defense secretary in April, and went into business for himself. His company, Medical Planning Resources Inc., tries to help government agencies plan for and respond to catastrophes, something, he says, they still aren't doing adequately. "I am upset by seeing very clearly what should have happened versus what did happen," Marghella says of the government's hurricane response. "The handwriting's been on the wall for a long time."

HHS' Parker sees things differently. "I think we did real good when you look at it in total," he says when asked to assess medical response to Katrina.

Back home in Tennessee, Martin sides with Marghella. "We failed," he says, frustration in his voice. "And unless there are dramatic major changes, we'll fail in the next one. These bureaucrats get wrapped up in making the system work, they forget the goal, to get people medical care. That's the important thing. I'm embarrassed for the guy saying we did a good job but didn't take care of anybody," Martin says. "Think about it."

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House panel to probe federal medical response capacity

Justin Rood — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

The House Homeland Security Committee is slated to hold a hearing Thursday focusing on how the federal medical response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita reflect the government's readiness to respond to biological or nuclear terrorist attacks.

While Congress gropes for answers, an investigation by Government Executive has found that the medical response to Katrina in particular was hamstrung by confused lines of responsibility, a failure to adequately plan for a disaster and a failure to follow what sparse plans had been made. The results of that investigation will be published in the Nov. 1 issue of Government Executive.

In Alexandria, La., more than 200 members of the U.S. Public Health Service were directed to erect a temporary 1,000-bed hospital but never saw a patient, Government Executive found. In Meridian, Miss., 79 PHS officers set up a 480-bed hospital that handled fewer than 50 patients, according to the Health and Human Services Department, which oversees the service. In Baton Rouge, FEMA set up a massive temporary hospital on the Louisiana State University campus staffed by dozens of medical responders, which went mostly unused, according to responders present.

Meanwhile, sick and injured hurricane victims went for days without help. Flooded hospitals waited for supplies and evacuation teams. Injured residents who did not or could not flee the storm could not reach the PHS field hospitals, which were miles away from the devastated region. It took well over a week, and sometimes longer, for federal medical workers to reach those people.

Part of the trouble may have stemmed from confusion at the top. Statutes and presidential directives are unclear about how FEMA and HHS share medical response functions, and the two do not always coordinate well. As a result, it is not always clear how responders and supplies are deployed, or how they integrate with other response efforts.

What's more, the response effort on the ground and in Washington was tangled in confusion over how medical needs were assessed, reported and met.

Dr. Susan Briggs coordinated medical response teams in Louisiana as part of FEMA's National Disaster Medical Service. Although she is normally under the Homeland Security Department's directions, as a medical response asset she was under the direction of HHS during this emergency. At one point, Briggs' personnel and their patients were suffering from dehydration, and she needed Gatorade--quickly. "We tasked it through HHS," Briggs said in a recent interview. "We were told it's not a medical need; it's logistics." She said she was told that therefore the request had to come from the state--and go to FEMA.

Briggs said an HHS official told her that if she resubmitted her request asking for "oral rehydration" instead of "Gatorade," it could be considered a valid medical need and the department could fill it directly. "I've never seen such poor coordination between federal agencies," she said.

According to Dr. Elin Gursky, a bioterrorism and public health expert with the government-sponsored ANSER Institute, such episodes show how the government would respond to a flu outbreak or other major medical disaster. "We're no more prepared for a pandemic outbreak than we were for Katrina," she said.

The House hearing will not feature FEMA or HHS officials as witnesses, although it will include two doctors who participated in response efforts to Rita and Katrina.

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Clean Sweep

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Katrina will spawn the biggest relief effort in recent history, a massive public works project and a major reassessment of emergency response. It also could restructure government at every level.

As the nation attempts to sort out the lessons of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, government, in both its political and bureaucratic aspects, is hunkering down and sorting out as well. In a variety of areas, politicians, policies, agencies and first responders have been found wanting. Now comes the question: What next? Government Executive takes a preliminary look at key failings, challenges and problems ahead for federalism, intergovernmental coordination, contracting, public health preparedness, energy and environmental protection through the eyes of government historians, experts, and federal, state and local officials.

Who's in Charge?

What does the response to Hurricane Katrina say about the state of federalism and governmental organization under the Bush administration? According to scholars and state, local and federal officials, it is an illuminating case study in the contradictions of Bush-style conservatism. It may be less surprising than it appears that a president whose political base is hostile to big government has expanded both bureaucracy and spending.

But, says Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian James MacGregor Burns-who counts himself a Bush admirer for both having an ideology and running a disciplined political operation-Katrina illustrates the peril of centralizing power on key issues (in this case, homeland security and emergency management), while retaining the traditional conservative distrust of professional civil servants at any level. "[Bush administration officials] mainly view civil service as 'bureaucracy,' something to be condemned, something they don't really have much respect for," he says. "I think this is rather tragic, because whatever bureaucracy's failings, there are some really wonderful people at every level of government trying to avert and address problems."

Some state and local officials say Washington has insisted on calling the shots on emergency management issues for which they have little appreciation. Rob Harper, public information officer at Washington state's Emergency Management Division, says that since Sept. 11, the Bush administration has decided that in the case of homeland security, the federal government automatically knew better, and has since shown little interest in state-specific nonterrorist matters.

This is no abstraction to Harper: In a recent meeting, he recalls, a Washington-based official at the Homeland Security Department derided the state's emergency management officials for being inadequately receptive to a lecture on bioterrorism. "My response was, well, we have some natural hazards that are probably greater than the threat terrorism poses and that other places won't ever have to worry about. We have the offshore Cascadia earthquake fault that rivals the one of Sumatra that caused the tsunami. We have a hazard off of Mount Rainier that could bury tens of thousands in minutes. Those are serious things."

William L. Waugh Jr., a public administration professor at Georgia State University who studies and consults on terrorism, natural disasters and emergency management, says Harper's sentiments are hardly unique. "One would think it would be the case with the Bush administration that a lot of attention or deference would be paid to states and localities on these issues, yet people have voiced concerns repeatedly that the Department of Homeland Security has not been inclusive or proactive about seeking out the opinions of state and local officials, or sensitive to their specific issues," he says.

The sad irony of all this, says R. Scott Fosler, a past president of the National Academy of Public Administration, is that emergency management a decade ago was based on assertively federalist thinking.

As head of a NAPA team assigned to produce a report that addressed the federal government's failures in August 1992 in responding to Hurricane Andrew, Fosler and his colleagues found that what was needed was not a massive federal response or hierarchy. "What we concluded was that the problem was not just FEMA per se, but the definition and mission of placing emergency management within a broader context of national networks," Fosler says. "And that gets exactly to the federalism issue-there is no way one single agency, state or federal, can hope to take responsibility in a catastrophic situation. One of the keys was to clarify and define the mission in a way that determines what the proper roles for governments, the private sector, NGOs and charitable organizations are."

And that, he says, led to another key matter-the importance of having not only experienced, professional leadership at FEMA, but leadership that, in addition to understanding the network concept with FEMA as a coordinating hub, also could apply an "all hazards" approach, which recognizes that emergency management operates on a continuum. It makes little difference who or what causes disasters, Fosler says; what matters is who's responsible for what. And to address that, he says, equal consideration has to be given to prevention, mitigation, response and recovery.

Part of the problem with the administration's notion of homeland security, he says, is that it's focused so much on preventing terrorism that it has marginalized the importance of the mitigation/response/recovery elements. It is DHS' duty to balance terrorism and other hazards and to effectively coordinate prevention and response among all levels of government. So far, things appear quite out of balance.

Fosler holds that suddenly pulling FEMA out of Homeland Security likely would be just as bad as it was to thrust FEMA into Homeland Security. "The important thing is to figure out why DHS did not perform the role it should have," he says. "And if it's not just about the personnel and management but the structure, the administration and Congress need to act swiftly to determine what the structure should be."

This could argue for either restoring FEMA to independent agency status operating with its late 1990s-era philosophy or rewiring DHS to accommodate a FEMA that takes a more network-centric approach to disasters, Fosler says. But, he emphasizes,"If you don't put people in charge of agencies who believe in them, who have the capacity and experience, it's not going to work."

Watching the Money

Reconstruction in the wake of Hurricane Katrina looks familiar to anyone witnessing the rebuilding of Iraq during the past two-and-a-half years. The government is relying largely on private contractors to complete huge projects quickly. But there's one big difference: During this latest emergency, lawmakers, auditors and even ordinary citizens are watching the contractors like a well-trained baby sitter would a child.

"The public, who has never cared about contracting at all, is outraged," says Danielle Brian, executive director of the Washington-based nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, referring to concern that contracts are being awarded without competition. If that's true, then it's probably a consequence of widespread reporting of waste and abuse in Iraq reconstruction. "Iraq is a cautionary tale for Katrina," says Gordon Adams, professor of international affairs at The George Washington University.

This time, the watchdogs were ready. The legislation Congress passed on Sept. 8 provided $51.8 billion for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts and set aside $15 million for the DHS inspector general's office. In addition, lawmakers, including Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., and Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., have proposed a variety of oversight and auditing bills. Homeland Security's inspector general opened a new unit to oversee hurricane-related spending. And the media and nonprofit groups have covered contracting in the region so heavily that taxpayers also are tuned in.

Waxman, an outspoken critic of contracting abuse in Iraq, says he already sees similar problems emerging from the Gulf Coast. He points to no-bid contracts, used by FEMA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, as a danger sign. "That's how we got in to so much trouble with our contracts in Iraq," he says.

James Mitchell, spokesman for the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, says many of the 61 criminal cases under investigation originate from the early days of reconstruction, before the office was set up. Early oversight is essential, he says, which is why Mitchell thinks the Gulf Coast needs the immediate attention of an inspector general.

Not everyone agrees. Barbara Bodine, a former ambassador who spent three months in 2003 as American coordinator for the reconstruction of Baghdad, warns against auditing excess. "The one thing I remember in Iraq, in the middle of high chaos, is that seven auditors showed up. I was like, 'This is really not the time. We have a crisis on our hands.' " The auditing, she says, needs to be done afterward. In the midst of a crisis, Bodine says a contracting coordinator should check contracts and look for signs of duplication or waste.

For now, contracting offices in Gulf Coast states are consumed with their immediate cleanup tasks. "There's not enough time to do anything but a limited competition," says Rich Johnson, director of contracting for the Army Corps' Mississippi Valley division. The Army Corps is responsible for ice and water delivery, water removal, temporary power, debris removal, temporary housing and roofing repair contracts in Hurricane Katrina's cleanup. A FEMA spokesman also says that competition is limited out of necessity to get contracts in place quickly.

Lessons for the next emergency already are emerging, such as the need for better planning. The Army Corps had pre-competed contracts for ice and debris removal, but had to quickly award contracts without competition when they ran out of capacity, says Johnson. FEMA had some pre-competed contracts, but not for many essential emergency services, such as trailers for temporary housing. "It looks like a lack of planning, a lack of foresight . . . a lack of imagining," says Bodine. No-bid contracts should be the exception because many emergency needs are predictable, she says.

Still, James Nagle, a lawyer and author of A History of Government Contracting (The George Washington University, 1992), says it's impossible to hold contracts to the same competitive standards used during normal times. "So the government will probably have to do what they did after Pearl Harbor and every other major catastrophe," he says. "But these methods are often criticized later."

Anemic Medical Response

While Katrina spread destruction across much of the Gulf Coast region, it seemed to cause relatively few injuries and deaths, at least compared with initial estimates by New Orleans officials that fatalities could top 10,000. The most critical challenges facing medical personnel were associated with trying to evacuate hospitals that lost power and communications. Delivery of medical assistance to those who stayed in the area, while uneven, appeared largely competent.

But the unprecedented emergency evacuation of the area has strained the health care services of the surrounding major cities, which absorbed hundreds of seriously ill patients from Gulf Coast hospitals as well as the tens of thousands of people who evacuated on their own, but required some form of medical care once they arrived.

In Atlanta, an estimated 30,000 displaced people sought care in the days after Katrina, putting a tremendous strain on the city's medical infrastructure. "On any given night, Atlanta can't handle our own 911 calls," says Dr. Arthur Kellerman, chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Emory University.

Ambulances with patients are redirected two, three or more times before finding an emergency room that can take them. "You've got patients who are in ER hallways waiting for a nonexistent inpatient care bed," says Kellerman. "How are we supposed to handle [such] extraordinary stress on the system?"

Atlanta coped by diverting patients from hospitals to specialized care facilities, Kellerman says. "We're meeting their health needs by [sending] people who need it to primary care [providers], dialysis centers and other places to keep them from going to the ER." It wasn't easy, he says.

Kellerman has tried to get state and federal officials to collect data on the effect of Katrina victims on the health care systems in the major cities to which they have flocked. Such information would be invaluable to improving the national response to a medical disaster, he says. But he has faced a widespread reluctance to collect those numbers-in part, he believes, because the statistics won't be pretty.

"I've been trying to get officials to monitor on a daily basis what's going on," he says, "so we could see what's happening with the numbers of ambulance diversions, the numbers of people in hallways. Here we have a natural experiment unfolding, but nobody's looking at that. I find that dumbfounding. This is a real-world test of our ability to handle a crisis, not a tabletop exercise."

The nightmare medical disaster for most emergency planners isn't a hurricane but a pandemic or bioterror attack. The United States' ability to respond is worrisome to many, at least in part for the weaknesses Kellerman is trying to highlight.

"We're about 5 percent as prepared for bioterror as we were for Katrina," says Chuck Ludlam, who as counsel to Sen. Lieberman developed a bioterror-preparedness program, which was the basis for President Bush's Bioshield initiative.

For one thing, says Ludlam, the federal government has no "boots on the ground" to respond to a medical catastrophe. In such an event, the government will be forced to rely on an untested cadre of volunteers and the same state and local health systems Kellerman says have trouble handling their own emergency calls.

Energy Vulnerability Continues

Hundreds of offshore oil and gas platforms dot the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and hundreds of oil-industry facilities and refineries line the coast. "There's a reason for this geographic concentration in a high-risk hurricane area," says Red Cavaney, president and chief executive officer of the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association of the oil and gas industry. "Government policies have limited offshore exploration and production to the central and western Gulf Coast, and our offshore facilities have been welcomed in communities in the region," he says. Offshore drilling is largely prohibited elsewhere in the Gulf Coast, and along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

Those restrictions, and the fact that nobody wants a refinery in their backyard (and only the poorest citizens will tolerate one), mean that the nation's energy infrastructure is highly concentrated and highly vulnerable to hurricanes such as Katrina and Rita. With 29 percent of domestic oil production and 19 percent of domestic natural gas production coming from the Gulf of Mexico, a blow to energy operations there has far-reaching consequences.

"It is ironic that we talk so much about diversifying the sources of our energy supplies from abroad, yet we have done so little to geographically diversify our oil and natural gas presence here at home," Cavaney says.

Before Hurricane Katrina struck at the heart of oil and gas operations in Louisiana and Mississippi, officials in the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, which oversees offshore oil and gas operations, implemented its continuity-of-operations plan and moved critical operations to Houston.

But on Sept. 22, before MMS could even locate all 600 employees displaced by Katrina, it was forced to close its temporary Houston office, this time on account of Rita. By then the cumulative oil and gas production shutdown over the previous four weeks equaled 5.2 percent and 3.6 percent, respectively, of annual oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico, according to MMS. And that was before Rita made landfall.

Katrina was a significant enough blow to prompt the Bush administration to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It is only the second time the reserve has been tapped since it was created by the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act following the 1973 to 1974 oil embargo by Arab states. The first time was during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

While there is widespread agreement that the nation's oil dependence poses enormous economic and national security risks, there is little agreement on what to do about it. The 1,724-page Energy Policy Act of 2005 calls for a comprehensive inventory and analysis of oil and gas reserves for all areas of the Outer Continental Shelf-85 percent of which is now off limits to development-but did little to address the nation's growing demand for oil.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton said in an Aug. 22 statement: "With our reliance on imports of foreign oil climbing each year, we would be irresponsible if we did not consider how we might develop these abundant domestic resources."

Norton's view is not universally shared. In a post-Katrina letter, Natural Resources Defense Council President John Adams wrote to members of the council: "Our nation simply does not have enough oil reserves to affect world oil prices. The only way out of this mess is to reduce our appetite for oil by improving the fuel economy of our vehicles [which consume 40 percent of our oil] and by relying on smarter, cleaner and renewable ways to power our economy."

Whatever approach Congress and the Bush administration take, it won't do much, if anything, to ease near-term vulnerability and economic pain. And that pain will be felt most keenly by those citizens who call the Gulf coast home and fuel the rest of the nation.

"We don't sunbathe on our coast. We produce energy to light up Chicago and New York and California," says Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., whose summer home on Lake Pontchartrain and the homes of four of her siblings in New Orleans were destroyed in Katrina's wrath. "We have most of the pipelines in the nation under this state. We provide natural gas and oil, and we are proud of that contribution, but as you can see there are costs associated with that . . . and we expect the nation to help us out at this time."

Ignoring the Environment

For the federal government, one of the most enduring lessons of Hurricane Katrina might be the importance of environmental considerations in large-scale public works programs. The chemical pollution in the Gulf of Mexico-which helped trigger a fishery failure declaration from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Sept. 9-wasn't unexpected. "That is the price of drilling for oil on your coast," says Landrieu.

Another environmental disaster-the noxious, watery soup of raw sewage and petroleum products the New Orleans flood created, was a consequence of levee failures that might have been mitigated with wiser investment.

Or so says Walter Maestri, the outspoken emergency management coordinator of suburban Jefferson Parish, who saw many of his flood mitigation programs suspended during the past five years as federal funds were redirected to homeland security priorities. Louisiana fights "terrorists like Katrina" that come back year after year, says Maestri. "When you don't fund awarded grants for draining projects and elevation of homes . . . you're going to end up in many cases with what occurs here."

While New Orleans siphons out the last of the fetid swill and starts shoveling up the toxic sludge, experts with the benefit of an arm's-length perspective on the worst natural disaster in U.S. history are thinking and talking about what constitutes an environmentally sound plan for rebuilding.

Once the debris is cleared away, local, state and federal governments will have what amounts to a blank slate for decisions about land use and public infrastructure for the first time in two centuries. Hydrologist Debra Knopman, a Clinton-era Interior Department administrator who directs the infrastructure, safety and environment division of RAND Corp., hopes decision-makers at all levels will take advantage of the opportunity to coordinate their plans. She says it's difficult for the U.S. political system to take the long view that these kinds of projects require.

"There is a critical path of decision-making in this reconstruction effort, and it's a values decision about how much protection Louisiana and New Orleans want and need. That is going to then set the stage for all the other decisions that need to get made in that region related to rebuilding or redevelopment," Knopman says. "I'm not sure we're going to get that sequence right because there's so much pressure now to act quickly."

The federal government is responsible for flood control because it's an interstate problem. There's high demand for federal flood protection all across the country, but there's a large pool of unmet needs because so many local governments are unwilling or unable to contribute more than a small portion of the cost. There's also no national priority-setting process for public flood works, and local bickering about how to build projects often causes budget-busting delays.

What happened in New Orleans is the product of this entrenched, piecemeal approach to satisfying the nation's infrastructure needs. The city was built below sea level, in a bowl rimmed with levees to keep Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River from pouring in. It sinks deeper by the day-an unintended consequence of keeping it dry.

The levees disrupt the natural replenishment process for the soil on which New Orleans and its environs sit. Restraining the river pushes silt deposits too far into the Gulf of Mexico, starving the marshes south of New Orleans. Three miles of marsh can absorb a foot of storm surge. But the marshes are disappearing. The Corps of Engineers has a comprehensive plan to restore the marshes and improve flood control in New Orleans with a new system of levees that will cost $14 billion. It's stalled in Congress in part because the price is so high.

Considering the level of economic development in New Orleans, a fresh look at the idea of protecting only for a Category 3 storm is long overdue. But other cities should take a lesson from Hurricane Katrina, says Knopman. "All around major metropolitan areas," she says, "we need to revisit the level of protection given the economic assets and economic damages that could result from flooding."

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FEMA's Decline

Justin Rood — Sat, 01 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Once the poster child for transformation and efficiency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency's slow slide from grace left it weak and ill-prepared for Katrina.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency and its recently deposed director, Michael Brown, have come under heavy fire for their delayed and uncoordinated efforts to support relief operations on the Gulf Coast. But experts and former FEMA officials say the weak response should not have been so surprising.

Over the last few years, the agency has suffered painful cuts in funding and staffing, they say-some in operations directly involved in responding to a catastrophe like Katrina. Further, they charge, seasoned leaders were being replaced by political hacks with no disaster management experience.

In recent years, warnings were prevalent that FEMA was no longer a model agency. Some came from the experts themselves.

"I'm extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded," former FEMA director James Lee Witt told Congress in March 2004. Witt, who led FEMA through the 1990s, is widely credited with turning around the agency, which previously had enjoyed a reputation as a haven for White House cronies and incompetents. "One state emergency manager told me, 'It's like a stake has been driven in the heart of the emergency management of this nation,' " Witt told the congressional panel.

Hints and Allegations

A flip through a stack of investigations and audits of FEMA during the past few years confirms that the agency has struggled. Since 2001, independent auditors have faulted its lax financial controls. Fraud and waste likely permeate FEMA's financial assistance programs, according to the inspector general of the Homeland Security Department, FEMA's parent agency. Agency officials have jeopardized their massive flood-mapping effort by misleading appropriators in Congress on their progress, according to an Aug. 5 article in CongressDaily. There has been continuing concern that FEMA's flood insurance program does not have the money to cover the long-term risk of damage claims. Claims from Katrina are expected to overwhelm the program's $2 billion reserves.

FEMA did not respond to requests for comments for this article.

Even FEMA's celebrated successes, such as its response to the Florida hurricanes last year, have come under scrutiny.

For starters, the agency distributed $30 million to residents of Miami-Dade County despite the fact that it was not part of the disaster area. Noting that the county was a pivotal region for the 2004 presidential election, critics were quick to label the disbursement political patronage. DHS' inspector general, Richard Skinner, still is investigating the charge, and critics are calling for a broader probe. In an earlier review, Skinner found FEMA paid for funerals for deaths that were not attributable to the hurricanes. Florida inspectors had a 37 percent error rate in their damage assessments, according Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chairwoman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. And an investigation this April by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper found FEMA hired criminals to perform home damage inspections.

All this provided ammunition for lawmakers eager to snipe at then-FEMA Director Michael Brown in public and behind closed doors. The Florida delegation had Brown appear before them after the disasters, says a Republican staffer. "These were the most heated exchanges I'd ever seen. It was an extremely bipartisan effort," says the aide, who would not be named discussing private congressional matters. "It was amazing to watch. There's not a lot of love [for Brown] from Florida members."

Brown, whose calamitous performance during the early days of the Gulf Coast catastrophe focused white-hot criticism on the Bush administration and led to his ouster, is a White House loyalist who took the helm at FEMA in 2003. In the eyes of the Bush administration and legislators, Brown's little more than a year as the agency's general counsel and then his stint as deputy director qualified him to lead the nation's response to disasters, even though he had no previous emergency management experience.

Like Brown's predecessor and college friend, Joe Allbaugh, a former Bush campaign manager, Brown was either unwilling or unable to use his administration ties to protect FEMA's operations against raiding parties dispatched by the White House and the Homeland Security Department. As a result, FEMA has suffered repeated budget and staffing cuts, including some in vital response operations.

Chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security Harold Rogers, R-Ky., and senior Democratic appropriator Martin Olav Sabo from Minnesota, along with FEMA employees, are concerned that DHS skims from the funding that legislators provide for FEMA. When Homeland Security was created, it took $80 million from FEMA-about one-seventh of the agency's operating budget, according to Brown-to cover departmental overhead costs.

Lost Muscle

"[Managers] euphemistically called it 'taxes,' " says Pleasant Mann, a 17-year FEMA emergency management specialist and former chief of the American Federation of Government Employees local that represents FEMA employees. "Congress would appropriate certain amounts for FEMA programs, and then DHS hierarchy would take chunks out of it." Much of it, says Mann, came from response planning and operations. This has been happening every year since FEMA joined the department, he believes.

The agency transferred $169 million to DHS in 2003 and 2004, and expects to lose at least $11 million to its parent in 2005, according to March 2004 FEMA responses to inquiries from the House Appropriations Committee. While some of that is due to the transfer of programs out of FEMA to other offices in DHS, the rest is attributed to vague causes such as "management cost savings realized from efficiencies attributable to the creation of DHS."

Staffing levels have been similarly reduced, former officials say. "People at DHS viewed FEMA as an organ donor," complained one former senior FEMA official, who insisted on anonymity. When DHS was created, only a few positions were allocated to staff its central offices, he said. "So [DHS officials] were literally taking whatever they could from the agencies that came into DHS to build their [own] infrastructure."

The Homeland Security Department did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

FEMA's core budget has been cut every year since it joined DHS, according to figures cited in the Los Angeles Times in September. In congressional testimony this March, Brown appeared to confirm that his agency lost 500 positions during that period. He said he was trying to get 190 positions reinstated. Some of the lost positions were connected to grant programs and offices transferred out of FEMA to other agencies within DHS. FEMA's 200-member IG office was moved in its entirety to Homeland Security, for example. When the fire grant program, which distributes more than $700 million, left FEMA, 40 employees went with it. But that was not always the case. "There were a number of times I was aware of that DHS went around and scooped up unobligated funds," recalls a former House Democratic staffer familiar with the agency. "Personnel were pulled out of FEMA and put into DHS."

As a result of hemorrhaging people and funding, FEMA appears to have lost muscle that could have been important in responding to Katrina. One former official frets that as much as a third of the staff has been cut from FEMA's five Mobile Emergency Response Support detachments, for instance. Those teams, each made up of several dozen trained experts and heavy vehicles, deploy instantly to set up communications gear, power generators and life-support equipment to help federal, state and local officials coordinate response to a disaster.

At one time, each team had nearly 60 members to work alternating 12-hour shifts during emergencies, according to the former MERS official. Today, teams average 42 members, according to the FEMA Web site.

The office responsible for deploying 9,000 doctors, nurses, pharmacists, medical examiners, pathologists, veterinarians and others, as well as several thousand disaster response experts, was cut nearly in half, from 18 full-time staffers to 10, according to another former FEMA official. The extra work is now said to be assigned to a contractor. "I'm sure Mike Brown was frustrated," says the official. "He watched a lot of things get dismantled, and no one paid attention."

The agency also cut one of its three Washington-based emergency management teams, according to the Los Angeles Times on Sept. 5. And last year, FEMA postponed workshops to prepare for a hurricane and flooding in New Orleans because of an unexpected budget shortfall, according to a Sept. 19 Wall Street Journal article.

"I think the FEMA budget should be dramatically increased," says Clark Kent Ervin, former Homeland Security inspector general. "And I say that as a conservative who's not reflexively for more government spending. The department has always tried to do homeland security on the cheap."

FEMA's staffing problems rise to the top of the organization. The agency's senior ranks, thick with nonpolitical career experts under Witt in the 1990s, now are rife with political appointees, temporary "acting" officials and vacancies, observers say. A Sept. 9 article in The Washington Post concluded that five of the agency's eight top officials had virtually no experience in handling disasters. Several seats are empty. A review of the most recent list of political appointee positions, published last November by the Office of Personnel Management, shows that 17 of FEMA's 46 "plum" jobs, all senior executive spots, were vacant.

Without capable leaders, it's hard to be a lead agency-a lesson Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff drove home when he yanked Brown from managing the response to Katrina, then reached past all of FEMA's top posts to tap the Coast Guard's chief of staff, Vice Adm. Thad Allen, to run the effort. A further lesson came in Brown's resignation and the naming of R. David Paulison to take his place at FEMA. A seasoned crisis manager, Paulison was administrator of the U.S. Fire Administration.

As FEMA's leadership, stature and competency eroded, morale collapsed among its employees, according to former FEMA officials. "There was a drain of experienced folks, who had been through the disasters of the 1990s," says a House staffer, a sentiment that has been repeated in the chorus of media reports about the agency since Katrina hit.

In 2003, half of all FEMA employees qualified for retirement. Many seasoned employees took advantage of that status. Others simply quit, or moved to other agencies. Still others were "pushed aside," according to Mann. "FEMA has gone from being a model agency to being one where funds are being misspent, employee morale has fallen and our nation's emergency management capability is being eroded," Mann wrote in a June 2004 letter to 20 members of Congress. "Since 2000, professional emergency managers . . . have been supplanted on the job [by] contractors and . . . novice employees."

Missed Signals

If there were so many signs and so many warnings that FEMA was not the agency it once was, then how did it keep its reputation? Mainly, it appears, because few outside the emergency response community were paying any attention.

Mann's letter to Congress, which the union released to the media, received little coverage. Witt's March 2004 comments expressing his concern that FEMA's abilities were crumbling were covered only by National Journal's Technology Daily and The Palm Beach Post newspaper in Florida.

The public and at least one independent inquiry likely will be asking hard questions about FEMA's blunders. Capitol Hill telephones are already ringing with calls to alter the agency. Some want to block Chertoff's plan to separate FEMA's response and recovery divisions, while others propose separating FEMA from DHS. More proposals are sure to surface.

The real question is what the Bush administration and Congress will do when the inquiries end. The 2004 Intelligence Reform Act, forced through in the wake of the 9/11 commission's report, has received decidedly mixed reviews. A hasty, public relations-driven reform following the Katrina investigations could bode ill for disaster response.

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FEMA’s decline: an agency's slow slide from grace

Justin Rood — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: This article appears in the Oct. 1 issue of Government Executive, along with other special coverage of the Hurricane Katrina response. For information on subscribing to the magazine, which is free to qualified federal managers and military officers, click here.

In recent years, warnings were prevalent that FEMA was no longer a model agency. Some came from the experts themselves.

Hints and Allegations

FEMA did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Even FEMA's celebrated successes, such as its response to the Florida hurricanes last year, have come under scrutiny.

Lost Muscle

The Homeland Security Department did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

FEMA's core budget has been cut every year since it joined DHS, according to figures cited in the Los Angeles Times in September. In congressional testimony this March, Brown appeared to confirm that his agency lost 500 positions during that period. He said he was trying to get 190 positions reinstated. Some of the lost positions were connected to grant programs and offices transferred out of FEMA to other agencies within DHS. FEMA's 200-member IG office was moved in its entirety to Homeland Security, for example. When the fire grant program, which distributes more than $700 million, left FEMA, 40 employees went with it. But that was not always the case. "There were a number of times I was aware of that DHS went around and scooped up unobligated funds," recalls a former House Democratic staffer familiar with the agency. "Personnel were pulled out of FEMA and put into DHS."

Missed Signals

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Chertoff warned of problems with separate border security agencies

Justin Rood — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Government Executive.

DHS Inspector General Richard Skinner told Chertoff that preserving the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection bureaus "would likely. . . exacerbate operational and informational stovepipes that are now only emerging," the document said, including creating "new intelligence stovepipes," which could have "significant national security implications."

"As we were drafting this report, [Skinner] met with the secretary and deputy secretary and discussed our findings," the document stated. "On June 27, 2005, a rough preliminary draft of this report was provided to the secretary." The document stated that Skinner's belief that the United States would be better served by a unified border security operation has not changed since then.

Chertoff's decision, announced July 13, not to merge ICE and CBP, but to place them under Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson's direction, "is contrary to our recommendation," the document said, "but clearly within his purview."

The report, stamped "For Official Use Only," has not been publicly released. A spokeswoman for the inspector general declined to confirm the authenticity of the document, although she said her office was aware that "there is a copy out there of a draft report." The office planned to make a version of the report public in the next couple of weeks, she said. "Until that time we can't comment."

DHS spokesman Jerrod Agen declined to comment on why Chertoff and Jackson apparently did not concur with Skinner's recommendations. "In the final report, we would offer an official response" to the IG's findings, he said.

ICE and CBP were established in 2003 in connection with the creation of the Homeland Security Department. They include various divisions of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, U.S. Customs Service, and other offices, most of which were involved in border security issues.

ICE, Homeland Security's largest law enforcement body, has an investigative "interior enforcement" mission, probing cases of people, drugs and other goods smuggled across U.S. borders. CBP has an inspection role, examining goods, people and vehicles when they cross the border.

A deep divide has opened between the two organizations, Skinner's staff found, that has in some cases weakened DHS' ability to secure borders. "The current organizational structure has fostered counterproductive divisions in the customs and immigration enforcement processes," the report stated. "[W]e were informed of serious incidents in which CBP and ICE coordination had broken down to the point of jeopardizing border security and officer safety."

A CBP spokesperson declined comment for this article, referring a reporter's questions to the Homeland Security Department's press office.

Since 2003, narcotics convictions from ICE investigations have fallen by more than half, and seizures are down nearly 25 percent, according to the report. Those statistics, "combined with the volume of testimonial evidence, suggest that degradation of border enforcement operations has occurred, in part, due to the ineffective coordination between CBP and ICE."

ICE spokesman Dean Boyd was familiar with the report, although he was not permitted to comment on its specifics. He did cite internal department statistics that appeared to contradict the IG's findings.

"In fiscal year 2004, ICE and CBP together were involved in the seizure of more than 3.1 million pounds of drugs," Boyd said. "That's a 63 percent increase over 2003, when [together] they were involved in seizures of 1.9 million pounds of illegal drugs."

Skinner's staff saw breakdowns in how the two organizations apprehended and prosecuted illegal immigrants, investigated crimes, and gathered and analyzed intelligence on smuggling activities.

"Shortfalls in operational coordination and information sharing have fostered an environment of uncertainty and mistrust between CBP and ICE personnel," Skinner's office found. "We detected a pronounced 'us versus them' attitude among the staffs at the locations we visited. . . . [W]e have been told of competition and, sometimes, interference."

Investigations Compromised

In the course of an alien smuggling investigation, a joint ICE-Border Patrol team went to the hotel room of suspected smugglers and knocked on the door. According to the report: "[N]o one answered, but team members could hear people inside. The ICE investigator told the Border Patrol agents that the team would have to get a search warrant. . . . The Border Patrol agents stated they were under a different chain of command and did not have to obey the investigator's instructions."

The Border Patrol agents had the hotel manager unlock the door. "Inside they discovered smuggled aliens," the report said, "but the case was never prosecuted because the evidence was not admissible."

The report included a range of allegations by CBP and ICE officials: "Many CBP employees report that ICE no longer accepts as many case referrals from CBP inspectors and Border Patrol agents," who have historically fed cases to ICE agents, read one charge. The report also noted, "Many ICE investigators reported that investigative coordination between CBP and ICE is also declining because CBP increasingly refers cases to other investigative agencies."

ICE's Boyd cited statistics that rebutted the IG's report. "The total number of referrals has increased under the current organizational structure," he said, "from 10,542 referrals made by CBP to ICE in fiscal 2003 to 11,326 referrals in fiscal 2004."

The rift is causing serious problems, the draft report noted. CBP no longer honors "routine requests for assistance," according to ICE investigators cited in the document. CBP also requires ICE investigators to have a CBP escort when visiting certain ports of entry, even though the same investigators had previously enjoyed "unrestricted access" to the same facilities, according to the report.

Not Connecting the Dots

Despite the similarity of their missions--in many cases CBP and ICE agents target the same types of criminals--the two agencies have separate intelligence structures, which produce separate reports, and generally do not share those products with each other, the IG found. "The current organizational structure has created new intelligence stovepipes that could have significant national security implications," the document stated.

"Rather than working more closely together. . . CBP and ICE field intelligence operations are drifting apart," the report concluded.

To store and share information, the two agencies use an outdated computer database that is not designed for intelligence work, the IG found. The system's outmoded classification measures shield information from many CBP employees who do not have the clearance to request it.

The report compared the two agencies' technology to that of the FBI's, which made it difficult for agents to find a memo from the bureau's Phoenix office warning about students at flight schools that, some speculate, could have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks: "Just as in the FBI's case, CBP's and ICE's overreliance on [an ineffective database] could similarly result in 'lost' intelligence or the inability of intelligence analysts to 'connect the dots.' "

Catch and Release

The IG report also detailed how illegal immigrants detained by CBP were often released by ICE, which runs DHS' detention facilities, because the agency does not have space to hold them.

The report said CBP's increased efforts to intercept aliens were not coordinated with ICE's detention and removal operations. Due to a combination of hiring freezes and regulatory restrictions, ICE's detention operations lost 10 percent of their bed space and 2 percent of their staff in the past couple of years, according to the report.

Meanwhile, CBP has apprehended more illegal aliens. In particular, detentions of people from countries other than Mexico have increased from slightly less than 50,000 in 2003 to more than 75,000 in 2004, and have continued to skyrocket in 2005.

The result has been "the release of increased numbers of apprehended aliens into the community," the report stated. Border Patrol officers are frustrated that ICE releases people from "special interest" countries--a term for nations that "present a potential terrorist threat to national security." The report estimated that ICE releases one in every five aliens from special interest countries that were apprehended by the Border Patrol.

"Without the support of increased transportation, detention space, and detention and removal staff, increases in apprehensions make little sense," the report concluded.

Again, Boyd cited numbers to rebut the IG's claims. "Under the current organizational structure, ICE has apprehended and removed more illegal aliens than at any other time in history," he said. "In 2004, ICE removed 162,000 illegal aliens from the country, including about 85,000 criminal aliens. Two years before that, under the INS, there were only 116,000 illegal aliens removed from the country."

Earlier this year, Skinner's office began a thorough assessment of ICE and CBP at the request of Sen. Susan M. Collins, R-Maine, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which resulted in the draft report.

Separation Anxiety

According to the report, at the time the Homeland Security Department was created, "senior managers and experts" on the teams advising the White House on the transition to the new department unanimously endorsed a unified border security operation, and specifically argued against creating separate divisions such as ICE and CBP. "All of the members of the transition team associated with border security advocated keeping the investigative and inspection functions unified," the report said.

"Splitting them would be unwise and not recommended," one adviser wrote at the time. Such a division would "create new stovepipes. . . where none currently exist," wrote another. "[S]uch a split would fragment responsibility and accountability for border enforcement," wrote a third, the IG reported.

In fact, Skinner's investigators could not determine why ICE, in particular, was created the way it was. "We could not find any documentation that fully explains the rationale and purpose underlying ICE's composition," the report stated, "Nor could anyone whom we interviewed provide a complete explanation of the thinking behind ICE's structure." Most ICE and CBP officials confessed to "still being puzzled" over the decision-making concerning ICE's structure.

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Ex-Army Corps officials say budget cuts imperiled flood mitigation efforts

Jason Vest and Justin Rood — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Mike Parker, the former head of the Army Corps of Engineers, was forced to resign in 2002 over budget disagreements with the White House. He clashed with Mitch Daniels, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, which sets the administration's annual budget goals.

"One time I took two pieces of steel into Mitch Daniels' office," Parker recalled. "They were exactly the same pieces of steel, except one had been under water in a Mississippi lock for 30 years, and the other was new. The first piece was completely corroded and falling apart because of a lack of funding. I said, 'Mitch, it doesn't matter if a terrorist blows the lock up or if it falls down because it disintegrates -- either way it's the same effect, and if we let it fall down, we have only ourselves to blame.' It made no impact on him whatsoever."

Daniels, now governor of Indiana, did not respond to a request for comment.

Parker -- who, along with members of his family, was forced to evacuate his Mississippi farm on Sunday night -- drew media attention (and the White House's ire) in 2002 by telling the Senate Budget Committee that a White House proposal to cut just over $2 billion from the Corps' $6 billion budget request would have a "negative impact" on the national interest. Parker also noted that cuts would mean the end of scores of contracts and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.

After Parker's Capitol Hill appearance, Daniels wrote an angry memo to President Bush, writing that Parker's testimony "reads badly. . . on the printed page," and that "Parker. . . [was] distancing [himself] actively from the administration." Parker, a former Republican congressman from Mississippi, was forced to resign shortly thereafter.

The Corps of Engineers handles many of the nation's largest infrastructure projects, such as draining and restoring wetlands, dredging ports and harbors, building dams, bridges and waterways, and preparing for and responding to natural disasters. In Katrina's wake, those functions have attracted the interest of policymakers and citizens alike.

The Corps' efforts have won it mixed reviews over the years. The New Orleans Times-Picayune wrote in 2002, "No one has been more responsible for keeping Louisiana habitable over the past 200 years than the Army Corps of Engineers. But the Corps has also caused the most problems."

The Bush administration consistently has pushed to trim the Corps' budget. But Congress has been reluctant to follow its lead, and regularly hands the organization several hundred million dollars more than the White House requests.

Amid the largesse, however, Congress and the administration have made targeted cuts, some of them in Louisiana. As New Orleans City Business noted earlier this year, the Corps' construction budget for the district has gone from $147 million in fiscal 2001 to $82 million in fiscal 2005. Scores of projects, from efforts to build levees, canals and pumping stations to bridge improvements -- all of which deal with flood mitigation -- are incomplete. (The administration's fiscal 2006 budget proposal cut construction funding for the district even further, to $56 million.)

The Southeast Louisiana Flood Control Project has felt the pinch particularly hard. After receiving $36.5 million for fiscal 2005, the project was cut to $10.4 million in the fiscal 2006 White House budget. The House has endorsed that funding level, while the Senate voted to boost funding to $37 million.

In a conference call with reporters Thursday, Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, the Corps' chief of engineers, denied that funding problems contributed to the crisis in New Orleans. "It is my opinion that based on the intensity of this storm, the flooding of the central business district and the French Quarter would still have occurred. I do not see that the level of funding was really a contributing factor in this case."

Some veteran Corps officials note that there's been a downward trend in funding since the Carter administration. But it's been more pronounced in recent years, and the New Orleans District has been particularly affected.

Among those who echo Parker's sentiments on budget priorities is Joseph Corrigan, who spent 2002-2004 as the deputy engineer for the Corps' Mobile, Ala., District. "We've had a number of really tough floods in recent years, but we have not been investing in levees, or flood damage reduction projects, the way we used to, even as populations have been exploding," Corrigan said. But, he adds, the lack of adequate preparation for the hurricane isn't exclusively about funding levels and priorities.

There is, for example, the issue of levee responsibility. "Not all of the levees, particularly in Mississippi and around the country, are federal," he said. "You may have a county or a local levee run by a local levee board, and private levee, and a federal levee that all have to work together, because if you have one fail, it can be disastrous." The coordination process is "excruciatingly difficult," he said, because the expertise and ability of local levee boards varies greatly. He also noted that projects frequently get delayed for years because of conflicts between state and federal agencies and environmental-related litigation, or because states and municipalities aren't able or interested in contributing to projects that have to be cost-shared.

Corrigan said that while the Corps both plans and trains extensively for disaster response, the affected Gulf Coast geography and scale of damage presents a unique challenge in effectively deploying resources.

"We go through exercises every year, and each Corps district has teams that are ready to roll when something happens, recognizing that the affected district's headquarters may be wiped out along with our people's homes," he said. "Right now, for example, I understand there's only 45 New Orleans District personnel on hand out of a 1,000-person district, so the Corps is shipping people in from all over to deal with every aspect of this. And we have open-ended contracts with contractors to be activated. The problem is figuring out if the contractors can still respond, and getting all the necessary equipment there. We have, for example, the Deployable Tactical Operations Center, essentially a mobile emergency headquarters. When I talked to guys two days ago trying to get it where it needs to be, they were having to use chainsaws every 200 yards to clear the way."

-- Senior correspondent Katherine McIntire Peters contributed to this story.

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Seattle man accused of plotting attack on federal building

Justin Rood — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Charles M. Whitaker, 53, was arrested Monday at his Seattle home after former roommates told the Federal Protective Service he had threatened to blow up the city's VA office because he had been denied benefits.

FPS officers found no evidence that Whitaker had been a Special Forces member, according to spokeswoman Virginia Kice. FPS provides security for all federally owned and leased facilities nationwide. It is a part of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau in the Homeland Security Department.

A search of the home Whitaker shared with roommates turned up papers showing he served as a photography technician in the Army from 1972 to 1974. Investigators also found military field manuals on making bombs and booby traps. In a nearby storage locker rented to Whitaker, agents found an inert hand grenade; two semiautomatic pistols--one 9 mm and one .22 caliber--and 200 rounds of ammunition.

Whitaker is expected to face state charges of making threats to bomb or injure property, according to an ICE press release. FPS and the U.S. Attorney's Office are considering whether to bring federal charges against Whitaker, who is currently being held in the King County Jail.

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