GOVERNMENT BY CRONYISM

You’d think President Bush would have learned from the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington that disaster relief is too important to be left to cronies.

He didn’t, and that’s one reason why the Bush administration was unprepared for the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history and slow and inept in its response.

Mr. Bush’s first head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Joe M. Allbaugh, was Mr, Bush’s chief of staff when he was governor of Texas and manager of his 2000 campaign for president. Kitty Kelley, in her 2004 book “The Family,” about the Bush dynasty, tells how Mr. Allbaugh and Karl Rove helped “tidy up the governor’s past.”

Mr. Allbaugh left FEMA in 2003 to become a consultant to business firms. Two of his clients, Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, and The Shaw Group, are working on disaster relief under big no-bid contracts.

When he left, his college roommate, Michael M. Brown, with even less disaster experience, was named director of FEMA, with Mr. Bush’s approval. After a storm of complaint and protest over his direction of disaster relief, he was reassigned to Washington and resigned three days later.

The Washington Post reported that five of eight top FEMA officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters. The top three leaders were advance men in Mr. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign, planning “town meetings” and screening audiences to assure friendliness. Was it any surprise that under their leadership FEMA tried to prevent news photographers covering the hurricane aftermath from taking pictures of the dead, an echo of the Pentagon’s prohibition of photographs of coffins returning from the Iraq war?

FEMA is far from the only example of cronyism. Critics and whistleblowers say cronies and political hacks have been given key jobs in the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, public broadcasting and even the Treasury Department, leading to an exodus of many veteran public servants with the necessary skill and experience to do their jobs.

Hugh Kaufman, the senior policy analyst in the EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, told a London newspaper, The Independent, that the agency had been cut out of the White House group handling the New Orleans crisis. He said the EPA’s budget had been cut and “inept political hacks have been put in key positions,” leading to an inadequate cleanup of the “toxic gumbo now drowning the city.”

Let’s hope that the new head of FEMA, R. David Paulison, a veteran firefighter and top FEMA official, will get the hurricane recovery on track at last.

And let’s hope that an independent investigation of the disaster will explore the sorry performance of cronies, who never should have been appointed in the first place.