A Crisis Agency In Crisis
FEMA's mission is dealing with emergencies. Now it faces one of its own
History. In Washington, however, bureaucratic problems tend not to attract much attention unless they come with a readily identifiable piñata attached, and, after Katrina, Brown was it. Before joining FEMA, Brown did not have experience managing a large staff. At his previous job, a 10-year stint as a judges and stewards commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association, he had only an assistant and a part-time secretary, according to a current official of the organization. But Brown, nevertheless, was a controversial figure. The association oversees horse shows, and part of Brown's job was to make sure judges, stewards, and breeders played by the rules. Myron Krause, the president of the association, said that Brown was not fired, as has been suggested in some news accounts, but that his departure was the result of an "amicable separation agreement." In a financial disclosure document filed with the federal government in 2001, Brown said that as part of a "severance agreement" he had been retained by the association at $100 an hour to assist "in the defense of ongoing litigation."
Last week, there were new questions raised about Brown's past. Time magazine's website reported, among other things, that Brown's official government bio said he was an assistant city manager in Edmond, Okla., when, in fact, he'd been assistant to the city manager, a lower-level position, according to officials in Edmond. FEMA spokesperson Nicol Andrews said Brown did indeed hold the assistant city manager's position.
Whether the firestorm of criticism of Brown is legitimate or not, it is true that inexperience and cronyism at the top of FEMA are nothing new. Louis Giuffrida, FEMA director during part of President Ronald Reagan's first term, was a close friend of Edwin Meese, Reagan's attorney general. And Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush's FEMA director before Brown, was Bush's chief of staff when he was governor of Texas and campaign manager for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000. Allbaugh handpicked Brown, his college buddy, for the general counsel position at FEMA in 2001. FEMA spokesman Mark Pfeifle told U.S. News that his boss worked on "more than 160 national disasters" while at FEMA, making him "hardly unqualified."
But FEMA had trouble under Brown even before Katrina. After four hurricanes ripped through Florida last year, the agency was praised for delivering lightning-fast aid. Months later, however, Senate investigators, tipped off by a series of stories in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel , found that FEMA had distributed millions of dollars to residents of counties only minimally affected by the storms.
Its internal troubles aside, FEMA's response to Katrina revealed the challenges the agency faces as it tries to implement some of its strategic plans. One example: the National Incident Management System, a major initiative aimed at mimicking the tactics used by effective first-responder teams out west. The system is meant to ensure that first responders nationwide use the same basic terminology and have managers capable of occupying the same basic leadership posts--like head of planning or finance, for instance--when responding to incidents. Mike Lohrey, a commander of a team that has used the system to respond to wildfires all over the Pacific Northwest, says it took his charges "about a decade" to get the system down. DHS launched the NIMS in March 2004; the deadline for its final implementation has already been delayed once.
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