FEMA Circles the Wagons

The FEMA folk are responding in a predictable way to critics. Like all Washington bureaucrats their first instinct is to CYA. In response to my queries about Director Brown and some of his critics my FEMA guy responded that criticism of the agency was just diverting blame from the real culprit, the CEO [Bush]. He thus joins a long list of Washington bureaucrats who, when an agency performs badly, blames the politicians and political appointees. This is an ingrained perspective that I have found time and again in correspondence and conversations with representatives of the permanent government. They just wish that the public, the media, and most of all the politicians, would just get out of the way, quit complaining, and let them get on with their jobs. The past few years have been ones of crisis in which one after another federal agencies have responded poorly to extreme demands. First the military [blame Rummy and his reforms], then the Intelligence "community" [blame Bush and Rove and Rummy], State [blame Bush and Rummy] now FEMA [blame Bush]. The plain fact is that over the past few decades the permanent government has become fat, complacent, inefficient and often incompetent. That doesn't matter too much when they don't have much to do. But when crisis strikes, or when you have an activist administration that begins to place demands on them, they can't respond effectively.

This is not new with the Bush administration. We saw the same thing happen under Clinton when the Justice Department screwed up time and again [blamed Reno and Clinton].

UPDATE:

The blame game advances. James Lee Witt, the superstar director of FEMA in the 1990's has been brought in to "consult" on the crisis. His first act -- giving interviews in which he blames the mess on homeland security. Classy guy, that Witt!

The Deputy Director is still giving interviews in which he says things are going swimmingly.

Faugh!

UPDATE:

One of my FEMA folk urges me to read this piece from the WaPo. It includes scathing criticism of the Department of Homeland Security and the Administration from:

1) Clark Kent Ervin, DHS's former inspector general who said: Katrina is a devastating indictment of this department's performance four years after 9/11. What they don't tell you is that Ervin was fired in December of 2004. He did not go willingly and complained on NPR about his ouster and since his dismissal has been a voiciferous critic of the DHS and a darling of the left [see here, and here]. In other words we have a disgruntled former employee who is determined to trash his former employers.

2) "We've had our first test, and we've failed miserably," said former representative Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.), a member of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. [What would you expect from a Democratic Party operative and a partisan voice on the 9/11 Commission?]

3) Joe Allbaugh, former FEMA director, who doesn't criticize DHS but simply says "Beyond terrorism, [a hurricane] was the one event I was most concerned with always." Note that his statement does not exactly convey confidence that FEMA prior to its integration into DHS was up to the job of dealing with something like Katrina.

4) And then there's C. Suzanne Mencer, a former senior homeland security official, who simply says that the DHS was formed to respond to terrorism and concentrated its efforts in that direction. Mencer, was a political appointment made to pay off Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell and only lasted about a year and a half in the job before resigning "to spend more time with her family" [a beltway euphemism for being forced out][here]. Another disgruntled former employee? Perhaps.

5) The article notes that the creation of DHS was quite a blow to FEMA. It lost its cabinet-level rank and its autonomy, a development that was bitterly resented by many senior FEMA officials. Now a "senior official" and a "veteran official" are quoted to the effect that the agency is not as efficient now as it once was. Not particularly surprising, or for that matter, credible testimony. Boo, hoo, we lost our cabinet level status and budgetary independence and now it's time for bitchiness and payback, anonymously of course.

6) They quote Richard Falkenrath, a Bush official, to the effect that the DHS was a response to pressures to centralize decision-making after 9/11 and that it treated all disaster threats [terrorist and natural] the same. The article, to be fair, notes that this has been official policy since the 1980's. This resulted in money being spent on preparing responses to all disasters rather than just to natural ones. FEMA resented this because it diluted its specialness as the experts on handling natural disasters. It's hard to see how this policy emphasis undermined preparedness for natural disasters but Jane Bullock [James Lee Witt's Chief of Staff in the Clinton Administration] laments the "deconstruction" of a "federal system that was perfected in the '90s." Ah yes, a Clintonista waxing nostalgic for the good old days when she and the divine JLW were running things. She's out of government now.

7) Another anonymous FEMA official said that Joe Allbaugh turned the focus of the agency away from natural disasters saying "you just don't get it" to the senior staff. Allbaugh admits saying it but places the quote in context. He was admonishng them to think big about catastrophic disasters [like Katrina or 9/11], rather than run of the mill responses to normal hurricanes.

I'm getting tired of this...., let's skip to the end.

The article ends with a quote from a Democratic politician -- Rep. Bennie Thompson -- to the effect that "We've been told time and time again that we are prepared for any emergency that comes, that we're ready," he said. "We're obviously not."

Ho hum..., this is your standard beltway hit piece. Disgruntled former employees, anonymous backbiting, bureaucratic infighting, payback, partisan politics, all played out in the pages of the WaPo. And nowhere is there a scintilla of evidence to suggest that even during its glory years FEMA could have effectively responded to a catastrophe on the scale of Katrina.

Is this the best you can do, Saruman?