A Crisis Agency In Crisis
FEMA's mission is dealing with emergencies. Now it faces one of its own
Other DHS initiatives have also moved slowly. Last winter, DHS released 15 planning scenarios, a list of worst-case terrorist events designed to make state and local officials think through what capabilities they might need when faced with a catastrophic event. Twelve of the 15 scenarios were terrorism related, and one was a Category 5 hurricane. DHS plans to use lessons learned from the scenarios to deliver to 3,000 local jurisdictions sophisticated to-do lists for first responders by September 2008. Says one DHS official involved in the effort: "It sounds basic, but a list like this has never been done before-- never. It doesn't materialize overnight."
Baby steps. Even the plan that was supposed to govern the response to Katrina--the National Response Plan--is still in its infant stages. The NRP, a 426-page document that establishes DHS as essentially the boss of all other federal agencies involved in the response to major catastrophes, was released in December 2004. One former DHS employee familiar with it says Brown and Chertoff, still new to it, were slow to put the NRP fully into play. Chertoff did not set the plan in motion--by declaring the event what DHS calls an "incident of national significance" --until Tuesday night, hours after the levees began hemorrhaging water into New Orleans. And an internal DHS memo shows that Brown waited until August 29, when Katrina was already battering the Gulf Coast, to ask that 1,000 DHS employees be sent to the scene. Brown suggested the officials be given 48 hours to materialize, a move critics say seemed leisurely. "What we're realizing now," says Rep. Peter King, a Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, "is that [federal officials] were just so careful and so worried that money would be misspent that they basically held back."
Turf war. And even a smoothly implemented NRP couldn't erase a potentially dicey turf war between DHS and the Department of Defense's Northern Command, the arm of DOD tasked with actions on U.S. soil. "That relationship is one of the most significant gray areas in homeland security," says Frank Cilluffo, a former White House homeland security adviser. Confused lines of authority could be partly responsible for a 30-hour window immediately after Katrina that the Pentagon is currently examining to see if it could have deployed resources more rapidly. Last week, DOD officials blamed Louisiana officials for not requesting help sooner. But it appeared DOD might also have been tussling with DHS behind the scenes. Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers acknowledged that the military began "pushing support before it was requested."
FEMA's future seems anything but certain. Hill staffers say that when congressional power brokers finally figure out what sort of probes they'll undertake, everything from FEMA's level of funding to the use of urban-area security grants will be on the examining table. And a host of congressional leaders have expressed support for legislation that would yank FEMA out of DHS, elevating it to a cabinet-level post. "Massive shock waves could come out of this," says former DHS Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin. By the time the dust settles, Brown's agency might need some emergency management of its own.
With Edward T. Pound, Danielle Knight, Julian E. Barnes, Judd Slivka and Kevin Whitelaw
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