FEMA’S SECOND LIFE

The big news from a Senate report on the response to Hurricane Katrina this week was its recommendation to abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency – an agency one of the report’s authors, Sen. Susan Collins, called “discredited, demoralized and dysfunctional. It is beyond repair.” But because the report would replace FEMA with a new agency to do much of the same job, only more effectively, the name change is minor. What counts is how the agency would respond to catastrophes.

The Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, led by Sens. Collins and ranking member Joseph Lieberman, spent seven months and took countless hours of testimony on the local, state and federal responses to the Category 5 hurricane and the devastating floods that hit New Orleans after its levees gave way. It found in its report “Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared” gross inadequacies at every level, according to a summary of the report.

State and local leaders failed to adequately inform the federal government that they were overwhelmed. FEMA failed to supply the personnel commensurate to the disaster. FEMA Director Michael Brown lacked leadership skills; Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff should have been more engaged in preparations; President Bush was too slow to react. The report does praise the effectiveness of the Coast Guard and some private-sector efforts to restore essential services.

But what to do? The senators propose to replace FEMA with an agency called the National Preparedness and Response Authority, including a director with the rank of deputy secretary within the Department of Homeland Security, chosen for professional rather than political skills, with direct reporting to the president during catastrophes and distinct-entity status that will protect its budget. It would create regional “strike teams” of emergency responders from all levels of government who train together and bring in other DHS offices for more effective coordination.

All good and likely necessary, but at least as important is the reintegration of the four basic functions of emergency management: preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation. This was a recommendation made to FEMA in 2004 by federal coordinating officers, the agency’s on-the-ground disaster experts who lead emergency response teams.

In a memo to Mr. Brown, they said the separation of emergency response and recovery teams “has caused an increasingly challenging issue for the connectivity of a ‘single incident’ response.”

The core of the problem is that the coordinating officers serve under the recovery division and the emergency response teams they lead serve under the response division, creating bureaucratic slowdowns and miscommunications.

The Senate report also covers areas such as post-storm evacuation, military support, health care and law enforcement – all clearly inadequate after Katrina. It makes the excellent proposal to restore coastal areas to protect against future storms. Yet the response from the administration was nearly as bad as its response to the hurricane. A White House official responded to the months of work and extensive reforms in the face of clear failure by saying, “Now is not the time to really look at moving organizational boxes.”

The administration for years has been warned about the problems within FEMA and handed some of the solutions that appear in the Senate report. Its own response has been weaker and more limited.

It’s true that now is not the time to make changes – 2004 was the time. But the White House missed that chance. Now it has a second opportunity with the Collins-Lieberman report, which is a lot more than some victims of Katrina had.