When Pointing Fingers . . .
JR., JOHN J. DIIULIO
When Pointing Fingers . . . Don't forget Congress. BY JOHN J. DIIULIO JR. WEEK BY WEEK in Katrina's wake, Americans and their leaders are in for two deeply painful civics lessons having nothing...
...A September 8 article on congressional oversight of the Army Corps of Engineers projects in Louisiana by the Washington Post's Michael Grunwald is a model of what sophisticated reporting can accomplish in this arena...
...That could mean that the administration was right in doubting that the new department was needed...
...Still, giving Congress its fair share of the blame, or holding it more strictly accountable than usual for what happens next, is no substitute for leaders at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue facing up to some hard realities...
...Religious leaders have called on their flocks to take in affected families and donate food, clothes, and money...
...On paper, some progress has been made in developing these "nationwide standards...
...Few things "are more difficult to change in Washington than congressional committee jurisdiction and prerogatives...
...In the same vein, the White House's belated call for a new homeland security agency was preceded, in its first homeland security blueprint, by the argument that private citizens, in conjunction with local government's "first responders," and in partnerships with corporations and businesses, could carry most of the weight in responding to emergencies and disasters that might be wrought by future terrorist attacks...
...Since 2003, FEMA has been in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS...
...President Bush called on his father and former President Clinton to lead a private fund drive for Americans in affected states like the one they had launched for Asia's tsunami victims...
...But the relevant administrative history here predates the DHS and trails back at least to FEMA's birth in 1979...
...The agency got some needed congressional attention, plus a little extra money, via the Clinton-Gore "reinventing government" initiative...
...Perhaps, as Katrina's flood waters recede, congressional politics will also recede far enough to permit the House and Senate to put effective policy implementation and administrative reform high on their respective pre-November 2006 agendas...
...Then came 9/11...
...That is inspiring, but, over the next two years, he will probably also need to sign another half-dozen or so $10-billion-plus federal disaster-relief bills to ensure that all Katrina victims get aid and all jobs get done...
...In May 2002, then-FEMA director Joe M. Allbaugh told Senate appropriators that in "addition to distributing this grant money," FEMA would commence "developing nationwide standards for states and local governments pertaining to first responder training, equipment interoperability, emergency planning, mutual aid, and evaluation...
...Meanwhile, congressional Democrats called for a big new "homeland defense" agency...
...Within six months, big-city mayors who had cheered the agency's creation charged that the department was not moving federal funds or providing technical assistance as it was supposed to do...
...to implement its own chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear countermeasures...
...If, at any point over the last three decades, Congress had heeded what so many nonpartisan experts had argued before it, and if it had wanted to build or empower a demonstrably better FEMA, it could have done so...
...In June 2002, the White House relented and joined this congressional chorus...
...Many businesses have pledged millions or reduced or frozen prices on needed goods...
...Congress largely obliged...
...to what government does or fails to do...
...In 2001, under Bush-Cheney, FEMA asked Congress for only $2.1 billion...
...By congressional charter, however, the agency has little real power to get other (often larger) government agencies to act (spend money, deploy personnel, provide information) when and as it deems necessary...
...That was putting it delicately...
...But, as we have all witnessed, America is hardly the national emergency preparedness paragon promised by every White House and Congress since 1979...
...Chertoff can make many critical changes to FEMA and other department subunits on his own authority, but any far-reaching changes to the DHS organization chart, and any new funds that will be needed, must be reviewed and approved by Congress...
...More likely, however, it means that the 9/11 Commission was right in arguing that the new department, and its subunits like FEMA, needs to be organized far more soundly...
...For nine months after 9/11, the White House, led by Office of Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge, argued that no such new department was needed...
...and, as we all now agree, to faithfully, not fitfully or futilely, follow its own emergency preparedness and response protocols...
...Within a year, the department's failure to coordinate critical activities with state and local governments (especially state and local law enforcement and public health agencies), and its distributive-politics-as-usual formulas for allocating grants (less money per capita for high-risk big cities than for low-density rural states) were already staple topics at academic public administration conferences...
...Chertoff's detailed plan envisions important organizational changes to almost every part of the sprawling homeland security bureaucracy including refocusing FEMA's 2,600-plus full-time employees on their "historic and vital mission of response and recovery...
...It has been blessed with capable civil servants and is rightly credited with responding well to myriad emergencies and disasters (floods, earthquakes, 9/11, and more...
...Unity of effort in executive management can be lost if it is fractured by divided congressional oversight...
...The media hounds who have barked at DHS secretary Michael Chertoff and the White House concerning whether Chertoff or other executive branch officials should resign would be more justified in sniffing after the past and present members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, who have overseen these agencies, and asking them whether they or members of their staffs should resign or apologize...
...military and Coast Guard personnel, several hundred federal law enforcement officers, and, last but not least, dozens of FEMA response units, on the ground in the affected communities...
...to effect its own proposed information analysis and infrastructure protection plans...
...From a public administration perspective, expecting FEMA to spearhead and sustain a truly effective "emergency management" response to Katrina would be almost as silly as expecting it to coordinate or command State Department and Pentagon efforts to secure, rebuild, and democratize Iraq...
...Some estimate that attending to Katrina-ravaged lives, properties, and streets will cost at least $100 billion before long...
...Better big government would not have spared the Big Easy and other affected communities, but it would have saved more lives and property...
...Congress, to its credit, has enacted many of the 9/11 Commission's proposals (some over White House objections), but it has not given the DHS or its subunits, including FEMA, appropriations and oversight that begets "unity of effort...
...FEMA is not now, and never has been, an agency that has the authority, the budget, and the staff to approximate its ambitious mission statement...
...Federal agencies report to the president but are Congress's fiscal and administrative creatures...
...To some extent, that has begun to happen...
...The hard-to-swallow truth is that the national government still needs to hire, train, manage, deploy, and pay tens of thousands more, and more specialized, homeland security personnel if it is to predictably and reliably meet its own official border and transportation security goals...
...FEMA's last real administrative tune-up along these lines was undertaken during the Clinton-Gore years by James Lee Witt, who came to the director's job with experience as a state emergency management specialist...
...the only thing worse than spending over two trillion tax dollars annually is having to watch as your big government at each and every level (federal, state, and local) moves too slow and comes up too small in performing such fundamental tasks as maintaining public order, guarding public health, and protecting private property...
...In Senate testimony given last March, FEMA director Michael D. Brown stated that the nation "is prepared as never before, to deal quickly and capably with the consequences of disasters and other domestic incidents...
...Founded in 1979, FEMA merged several separate disaster-response agencies...
...FEMA's battle-tested genius is in forging ad hoc cooperation and coordination with whatever other federal, state, or local public agencies or other organizations may be involved in a particular situation...
...Or, what would be far more constructive, the Washington press corps should trouble itself—and also trouble the Congress—to pay close attention to the promising six-point plan for "realigning" the DHS that Chertoff announced just this past July...
...For almost a half-century now, the nation's legislative branch has made federal bureaucracies into a bloody mess...
...In 2002, FEMA, closer than ever to political front-burners, asked Congress for $6.4 billion, including $3.5 billion for local police, firefighters, and other "first respon-ders...
...At times such as these, there is, alas, precious little that even a determined president, his White House staff, or his political appointees in the agencies can do to clean up the mess, change how things work, or improve government performance...
...The 9/11 Commission was also dead right when it lamented that needed reforms to DHS and other agencies "will not work if congressional oversight does not change too...
...But, as most everyone agrees, that effort by the federal government's third biggest bureaucracy was still too little and too late for too many people and too much property...
...As always, the charitable impulse and volunteer spirit are all to the civic good...
...In July 2004, the 9/11 Commission's 567-page report politely but pointedly called on the DHS to "go beyond preexisting jobs of the agencies that have been brought together inside" it...
...With DHS as its new parent, FEMA joined a bureaucratically dysfunctional extended family...
...When it debuted in March 2003, the DHS encompassed 22 separate agencies, over 170,000 employees, and a roughly $40 billion budget...
...Universities around the country have mobilized volunteers and matriculated students from hurricane-damaged colleges...
...Who pays...
...Whether we are talking about putting enough "boots on the ground" in New Orleans or in the new Iraq, we are talking about Congress appropriating money in nine-zero-figure amounts for years to come...
...The idea was also championed by key Senate Republicans and finally by many House Republicans...
...During its first decade, FEMA could do little to tame the hyper-fragmentation that had long plagued major disaster-relief operations (and that was the original justification for its own founding...
...But Congress has kept FEMA on a short and raggedy appropriations and oversight leash...
...The moment's critical case in point is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA...
...And these are just a few of the private efforts...
...It was also largely indistinguishable from the effort that the White House itself could have rung up and got rolling without any new mega-department...
...When it comes to emergency planning, disaster preparedness, hazard mitigation, and other key responsibilities, the often-heroic FEMA is but the national government's anemic administrative finger in the dike...
...In fiscal year 1998, FEMA asked Congress for $3.2 billion, and got most of what it wanted...
...Lesson two is that what passes for big government in this country belongs to Congress...
...Lesson one is that the only thing worse than having big government in the first place is relying on it to achieve big goals that it cannot, in fact, achieve without additional funding and far-reaching administrative reforms...
...WEEK BY WEEK in Katrina's wake, Americans and their leaders are in for two deeply painful civics lessons having nothing whatsoever to do with racially conditioned responses or partisan politics...
...Charitable organizations have gone into overdrive...
...But, the day after Katrina struck, FEMA leaders sounded too much like really good next-door neighbors, and not enough like responsible national officials, in pledging that they would stick by and assist the victims...
...The long and checkered congressional appropriations and oversight record in this case displays no such desire on the part of the agency's Capitol Hill overseers...
...Few topics are as boring as administrative history, but none matters more John J. DiIulio Jr., a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is coauthor (with James Q. Wilson) of American Government: Institutions and Policies (Houghton-Mifflin Company), now in its tenth edition...
...Before Katrina's damage was a week old, the DHS led an effort that put over 15,000 National Guardsmen, over 12,000 U.S...
...However, despite continuing improvements to the domestic incident architecture, planning for a comprehensive and effective response to—and recovery from—a catastrophic incident is still a challenge to the emergency management community...
...In 2000, however, the agency hatched a five-year strategic plan that few experts believed (correctly, as it turned out) it could fulfill...
...In the mid-90s, Midwest floods and other disasters sent FEMA reeling...
Vol. 11 • September 2005 • No. 1
