A Crisis Agency In Crisis
FEMA's mission is dealing with emergencies. Now it faces one of its own
Almost from the moment Katrina struck, Michael Brown, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was the subject of ferocious criticism. But last week things got even worse for the FEMA chief. The announcement by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that Brown would be replaced as the lead federal relief official in New Orleans by Coast Guard veteran Thad Allen was a blunt rebuke, especially by an administration that typically ignores disapproval of its own and prizes loyalty among top officials. Calls for Brown's head escalated. Published reports raised questions about the accuracy of Brown's official government bio. By week's end, Brown was packing his bags for Washington while Allen assumed expanded responsibilities for all Katrina-related recovery efforts.
Brown's public humiliation was just Act I in a classic Washington passion play. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers debated how FEMA should be managed, why it was so slow off the mark, and what needs to be done to fix the place. In reality, though, FEMA's problems are far more complicated than the Katrina imbroglio might indicate. And they're not going to be solved just by getting rid of Brown.
Created in 1979, after criticism of previous disaster-relief efforts, FEMA is no stranger to controversy. After Hurricane Hugo in 1989, South Carolina Sen. Fritz Hollings called FEMA officials "the sorriest bunch of bureaucratic jackasses I've ever known." Kate Hale, the former emergency management director of Miami- Dade County, was so exasperated by FEMA's response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 that she asked in a tearful press conference, "Where the hell is the cavalry?"
After that, some say, things got a bit better. President Bill Clinton gave FEMA cabinet status, and his director, James Lee Witt, a former Arkansas emergency management director, received generally high marks.
But FEMA's privileged status was short-lived. Two years ago, the agency was merged with the 180,000-person Department of Homeland Security. That, says George Haddow, a former deputy chief of staff at FEMA during the Clinton administration, spelled trouble. After 9/11, Haddow explains, "disaster management and response didn't fit with the [FEMA] program." Homeland Security officials say their department focuses on "all hazards," but detractors saw the FEMA they knew depleted and consigned to the back burner. Earlier this summer, the Government Accountability Office reported that first responders complained that the Department of Homeland Security's "emphasis for grant funding was too heavily focused on terrorism." In a survey last year, 80 percent of FEMA employees said the agency had been weakened by joining DHS.
Not all of the agency's problems are the result of the merger, however. According to FEMA's website, roughly a third of its current senior staff is made up of "acting" employees. "FEMA has absolutely no stability," says Rep. Bennie Thompson, the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee. " . . . So it's impossible for any local official to form any kind of meaningful relationship with the top."
Many critics say that inexperienced leadership has contributed to FEMA's woes. According to the Washington Post , five of FEMA's top eight officials had virtually no disaster-management experience when they joined the agency.
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.
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
This story appears in the September 19, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.