The consequences of packing FEMA with political hacks with no emergency management experience and otherwise decimating the agency are now well known. And every day brings us new details of the vast horror on the Gulf, and the horrors of the government’s handling of the entire situation.
Our consciences continue to fill with an outrage that cannot be contained by mere White House spin doctors. Those levees have been breached.
FEMA Director Michael Brown, who was relieved of day-to-day responsibility for Katrina relief efforts in the Gulf is not gone and not forgotten. He was certainly a PR disaster for the Bush administration every time he appeared in public. However the real disaster is what Brown and more importantly what the White House did and did not do over the past few years.
Knight Ridder newspapers is reporting that Brown is “the poster boy for what’s gone wrong with an agency once lauded for its lightning reflexes. The nation’s federal disaster agency has been politicized and dismantled over the past four years and Brown is a symptom of that transformation, said disaster and government-efficiency experts.
“The Bush administration has filled FEMA’s top jobs with political patronage appointees with no emergency-management experience, cut disaster-preparedness budgets and marginalized the agency by merging it with the new anti-terrorism bureaucracy, according to those experts, which include four former senior FEMA officials. The number of career disaster-management professionals in senior FEMA jobs has been cut by more than 50 percent since 2000, federal personnel records show…..
George Haddow, a former FEMA deputy chief of staff under President Clinton and the co-author of an emergency-management textbook, called what happened in the last four years the ‘deconstruction of the most robust emergency management and effective response system in the world.'”
“New York University Public Service professor Paul C. Light….[said] ‘The real problem here is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with the appointments process. It’s the people who decided to put him in place and put all those politicals in place.’
Seems to me that Light has it exactly right. Brown deserves plenty of criticism — but he is not the only one. In fact, he is not even the biggest problem. In fact, to borrow an expression from the Nixon administration when it found itself under seige, Brown is being left to “twist slowly in the wind.”
The real problem is the people in the White House.