"Deliver Us from FEMA"

Says the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in a report released to the important senators today (to the public next week). An article from the Washington Post has this summarize the report:

...[The report] makes 86 recommendations that would undo major changes made when President Bush and Congress launched the department in 2003, and would reverse parts of a reorganization ordered by Secretary Michael Chertoff last summer. It stops short of restoring FEMA to independent, Cabinet-level status, as many in Congress and former agency directors want, but would promote its chief to confer directly with the president in a crisis, according to a summary released to news organizations...

The new agency would be called the National Preparedness and Response Authority (NPRA...just doesn't have the same ring to it) and would still be under the banner of Homeland Security saying that separating FEMA from Homeland would "do nothing to solve the key problems that Katrina has revealed, including a lack of resources and weak and ineffective leadership." A statement leading one to ask, "And what about that leadership? Chertoff's getting kicked to the curb, right?"--Uh...no. This failure to call for the resignation of Chertoff disappointed several House Democrats but admit that it is complete.

There are two major problems I see with their reasoning for wanting the removal of Chertoff:

1. Ultimately, this task should have never been assigned to his Department. Keeping terrorists out of the US should be a fulltime job and his attention should be focused sigle-mindedly upon that task. Let's assume he was doing this (there is no reason not to) one could see how a hurricane could sneak up on him. That statement was intended to be sarcastic, but he could not have been expected to focusing intently on hurricanes when there are other national security concerns. Also his mandate is over the entirety of DHS he relies on his subordinates to tell him what is going on. This brings me to my second problem.
2. He had a Presidential appointee and complete idiot (disaster-wise) running FEMA who did not effectively communicate to him realtime issues on the ground. Michael "Brownie" Brown's previous job, before FEMA, was investigating ethics concerns for the IAHA (International Arabian Horse Association)...incidently, he was forced to resign from his post at IAHA (judging from the results of his work at IAHA and FEMA i have determined that acronyms are Brownie's kryptonite). Brownie has also blamed just about everybody involved in the Katrina Debacle. He started by laying most of the blame on Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco (neither, by any stretch of the imagination, blameless), then recant and taking on much of the responsibility himself, but most recently blaming Michael Chertoff and indirectly President Bush.

Now, don't get me wrong. Chertoff did not do a good job on this one, and there is no way to predict, if a terrorist attack occurs, he will be able to respond in a manner different from Katrina. But the fact is that Homeland is an amalgom of 22 previously existing federal agencies and the third largest cabinet department. Chertoff is the man who managed the reorganization of these separate agencies in to Homeland. If we are going to fire him for something, fire him for bureaucratizing Homeland into an organization unable to move without completing requisition forms in triplicate.

It is my opinion that DHS was great in theory but whoever made the decision to galvanize these 22 separate departments was lacking in practical vision but was able to wrap the idea in a pretty enough package for the administration to buy it. The fact is the Department in its present state is too bureaucratic to be effective in energency management and I hope that giving FEMA a new name and a cabinet postition for its director will help it. The most important thing that needs to be done, though, for this action to be effective is to put QUALIFIED people in the power positions. We don't need another horse-judge-investigating lawyer in control of that post; we need someone with credentials. And we need it quick, hurricane season is right around the corner and I don't feel like swimming to work.