After an arduous investigation into what went wrong in the government’s too-little, too-late response to Hurricane Katrina, a Senate panel that spent seven months interviewing more than 320 witnesses from the nation’s worst natural disaster concluded that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is broken beyond repair.
Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., said at a joint press conference Thursday that FEMA has become such a “symbol of a bumbling bureaucracy” that it should be scrapped and replaced with an independent Cabinet-level agency that communicates directly with the president during a crisis.
This is basically the same recommendation a House select committee chaired by Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., made in February. That 505-page report blamed “organizational inaction” by “risk aversive” government officials at all levels for the spectacular failure to act before the devastating storm made landfall two days after they were warned it was coming.
White House Homeland Security Adviser Frances Townsend’s tepid reply to the Senate Katrina report — which will be presented to the full Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this week — was that “now is not the time to look at moving organizational boxes around.”
It’s time to erase a lot of those boxes, especially the ones that kept critical information from reaching decision-makers before Katrina battered the Gulf Coast and left more than 1,300 dead, hundreds of thousands homeless and billions in property damage. Contrary to both its name and mission, FEMA didn’t work.
National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield, whose accurate warnings about Katrina’s potential for massive destruction were ignored, recently told stunned emergency responders in Maryland that they shouldn’t be “waiting for the cavalry” to come. Individuals were strongly urged to assume responsibility for themselves and not wait for help that may not arrive.
If surviving a deadly hurricane, massive earthquake, pandemic or terrorist attack has become a do-it-yourself project, then we don’t need FEMA, which was established after the 1974 Disaster Relief Act gave the president power to declare a state of national emergency. The National Governors Association had asked former President Jimmy Carter to centralize federal emergency management because the states didn’t have enough resources to deal with large-scale calamities. They still don’t.
Katrina survivors and first responders bitterly complained about bungled communications and the lack of a clear chain of command. Next to the presidency, heading FEMA is the most “buck-stops-here” job in the federal government; both literally make life-and-death decisions involving millions of people.
Merely abolishing FEMA and setting up another agency with a different name won’t fix anything unless a federal disaster czar is personally responsible for large-scale planning that includes compiling a list of all available regional resources ready to go at a moment’s notice. When state and local officials call for help, they must understand that once a national emergency has been declared, the disaster czar calls the shots.
The only other alternative is to divvy up FEMA’s $4.8 billion budget 51 ways and hope for the best.
