FEMA gets a makeoverBy G.W. Schulz
The major news organizations hardly touched it, but a congressional appropriations provision reorganizing and renaming FEMA passed the Senate 87 to 11 last week. To his begrudging credit, Sen. Trent Lott, a Republican from Mississippi, originally wanted to make FEMA a federal agency independent of the Department of Homeland Security, a plan that would have stripped away the enormous layers of bureaucracy some say lead to the slow response to Hurricane Katrina.
FEMA’s director could now – if the restructuring works – directly access the president during states of emergency and move with more flexibility by possessing its own command and control structure during disasters, according to a statement from Lott’s office. Many of Lott’s constituents, of course, were badly battered during last summer’s hurricane season. And FEMA’s response to the storms was not unlike like an emergency vehicle full of paramedics arriving three days late to an accident scene because they had to call their boss at every stop sign.
Senators Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman, a Republican and Democrat respectively, co-sponsored the legislation and said that, in particular, the name change was necessary due to how poorly FEMA performed during Katrina. The change is slight – FEMA will now be known as the U.S. Emergency Management Agency. The real change is to the acronym, which citizens are most familiar with, good and bad.
The question that arises for me is this: Instead of spending God-knows-how-much changing the letterhead and those bright yellow agency identifications on the back of their weather-proof jackets, couldn’t they keep the old name and simply resolve to improve FEMA’s image by performing exceptionally well next time a disaster strikes? The name change smacks of an effort by some overpaid inside-the-Beltway communications staffer who’d rather fix things with a new name, a few poignant commercials and a press release rather than truly fix an embattled federal agency with a wasted reputation.
PBS’s Frontline did a great assessment of the response to Katrina last November. They concluded basically that Louisiana state emergency officials had in fact submitted a detailed list of items they needed for the recovery effort to the feds, but the feds never really got it together fast enough.
For decades, FEMA was known as a trash dump for political hacks until the Clinton White House set out to make it a respectable, cabinet-level agency headed by James Lee Witt, who earned a reasonably good reputation. He eventually left FEMA, however, and its status as a place to process political favors returned under Bush Jr. Making matters worse, after Sept. 11, the massive reorganization of the federal government brought FEMA under the broad umbrella of homeland security.
Despite Lott’s attempts, it’s appears unlikely that the legislation will survive the House without FEMA remaining where it is in DHS, but certainly Katrina taught us that disasters can come in many forms. It also taught us that for as much as the Republicans like to talk about reducing government bureaucracy, they’re just as likely to indulge in political patronage as the Democrats.
As far as current media coverage of the renaming goes, the Times at least did a story, but it was couched tellingly in a larger piece about domestic-security funding.
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Comments (1)
FEMA serves as a shining example of the fact that It simply doesn't matter how much you reorganize a dysfunctional Agency, or who is at the helm, it will still remain dysfunctional. Or, in the case of FEMA, continue to be grossly mis-managed by mid- and low-level bureaucrats whom have repeatedly demonstrated their individual and collective ineptitude and incompetence.
Despite what the vaunted Director and his media coverage mongering Deputy's would lead us to believe, there is absolutely no basis in fact for presuming that FEMA's is more capable today of managing a disaster than it was during and immediately after Hurricane Katrina. In reality, a glimpse at just one aspect of day-to-day operations indicates that exactly the opposite may very well be true.
FEMA, since taking over the National Preparedness Directorate that it fought so hard to gain control of since it's inception as the Office of Domestic Preparedness under DOJ and later, DHS, has once again demonstrated a propensity for being incapable of managing even the most mundane functions, leading to signifcant doubts that the Agency as it exists today would be any more capable of dealing with a large scale disaster than it was during Hurricane Katrina. Or, for that matter, even a small one.
Just one example of the continued dysfunction involves funding for many key programs operated under the auspices of FEMA NPD, all which was allocated when the Federal budget was finally passed earlier this year. To date, much of this allocated funding continues to languish as the office moves at glacial speed to complete the administrative process required to release the funding, leaving many State and local agencies without the means to continue with preparedness efforts or correct shortcomings and fill gaps identifed earlier under of these same yet-to-be-funded-for FY08 programs. In some cases, these delays in aid and assistance to State and local recipients have gone on for three, four and even five months.
Several of these awarded but as-of-yet unfunded programs have been described at various times by members of the Adminstration, Congress and FEMA's vaunted Diretor and Deputy Director's as "vital", "critical" and "the cornerstone of our nation's preparedness". If this is how the Agency handles high-profile, high priority programs aimed at aiding State and local governments prepare for the worst, it leaves little room for doubt regarding the Agency's capability to provide support in an emergency.
There is absolutely no need to wait or the next disaster to determine whether or not FEMA is capable of managing the next Katrina-esque disaster. As is evident today, the Agency is incapable of effectively managing it's day-to-day operations, regardless of how extensive a reorganization it has undergone or who is at the helm.
Posted by Ivan the Terrible | May 9, 2008 07:56 AM