With outrage still building over the
excruciatingly inadequate federal response to Hurricane Katrina,
the Federal Emergency Management Agency is facing a political storm
of its own. The question of how FEMA — the government agency
most responsible for containing the damage of such catastrophes
— seemed to have abandoned hundreds of thousands of suffering
Americans now seems destined for multiple government
investigations.
Tracing back through recent developments in
federal emergency policy, there were some clear warning signs that
FEMA has been set up to falter. A year ago, during the wave of
hurricanes and floods that battered communities across the South,
seven newsweeklies led by the Independent
Weekly of Durham, N.C.,
collaborated on an investigation of FEMA’s approach to
natural disasters under the Bush administration. The report showed
that FEMA, which had during the 1990s won widespread praise for
advancing its approach to natural disasters, was in a severe
backslide [Jon Elliston, “A disaster waiting to
happen,” Sept. 30, 2004].
Emergency managers from both inside and
outside of government said in the story that President George W.
Bush has drained FEMA’s natural disaster programs in a series
of policy and budget changes, including:
• The
appointment of political cronies rather than disaster experts to
top posts. The current director of
FEMA, former attorney Michael Brown, took on the job from
Bush’s first FEMA director, Joe Allbaugh — the
president’s former chief of staff from Texas, who had no
significant experience in managing disasters. “Our
professional staff are being systematically replaced by politically
connected novices and contractors,” Pleasant Mann, a 16-year
FEMA veteran and president of the agency’s government employees’ union, warned Congress last
summer.
• A push to
privatize some of the agency’s key functions. William Waugh, a disaster expert at Georgia State
University who has written training programs for FEMA, warned that
outsourcing had not served natural disaster programs well.
“It’s part of a widespread problem of government
contracting out capabilities,” he says. “Pretty soon,
governments can’t do things because they’ve given up
those capabilities to the private sector.”
•A
philosophical shift by the Bush administration away from federal
responsibility. As we wrote, “In
a May 15, 2001, appearance before a Senate appropriations
subcommittee, Allbaugh signaled that the new, stripped-down
approach would be applied at FEMA as well. “Many are
concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into
both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to
effective state and local risk management,” he said.
“Expectations of when the federal government should be
involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond
what is an appropriate level.”
• Cuts to
key “disaster mitigation” programs. Such programs, which have proven to be both
cost-effective and in some cases life-saving, included FEMA’s
Project Impact, a model mitigation program created in 1997 but ended by
the White House in 2001. Federal funding of post-disaster mitigation
efforts designed to protect people and property from the next disaster
has been cut in half. Communities across the country now must compete
for pre-disaster mitigation dollars. Last year, Eileen Loh Harrist, a
writer for the New Orleans newspaper Gambit
Weekly, reported that Jefferson Parish,
La., (which has now been hit by Katrina) had seen FEMA reject no less
than three of its recent requests for flood-mitigation grants.
• FEMA was
folded into the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. “Before, we reported straight to the White
House, and now we’ve got this elaborate bureaucracy on top of
us,” Mann said last year. “And a lot of this
bureaucracy doesn’t think what we’re doing is that important, because terrorism isn’t our
number one.” In testimony to Congress in March 2004, James Lee
Witt, who directed FEMA during the agency’s heyday in the 1990s,
said he was “extremely concerned that the ability of our nation
to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded”
because of the merger of FEMA into the DHS.
A year later, these concerns have only
intensified. After the devastation of Katrina, and amid the
mounting evidence that the federal government has done far too
little, far too late to assist the storm’s victims, some of
the country’s most experienced emergency managers have
stepped forward to sound an alarm.
“We are so much less than what we were
in 2000,” said an unnamed “senior FEMA official”
in a Sept. 1 Washington Post article. Another FEMA veteran said,
“It’s such an irony I hate to say it, but we have less
capability today than we did on Sept. 11.”
Eric Tolbert, a former North Carolina state
emergency director who was a high-ranking FEMA official from 2002
until February of this year, told a Knight-Ridder reporter that the
disastrous disaster response in the Gulf Coast was a product of
FEMA’s misplaced priorities.
“What you’re seeing is revealing
weaknesses in the state, local and federal levels,” he said
in the midst of New Orleans’ weeklong wait for substantial
assistance.
“All three levels have been weakened.
They’ve been weakened by diversion into terrorism.”
And in an interview with Salon.com, Tolbert
drew a direct connection between FEMA’s recent breakdown and
the calamity unfolding in that city.
In the summer of 2004, he said, the agency ran
a “tabletop exercise” in Baton Rouge as part of an
effort to craft a new plan for dealing with a serious hurricane
strike in the New Orleans area. But then, the money dried up.
“Unfortunately,” Tolbert said,
“we were not able to finish the plan.”
This article appears in Sep 8-14, 2005.
