FEMA’S PLACE

By an overwhelming vote last week the Senate approved the reform of the beleaguered Fed-eral Emergency Management Agency, a vote that will become more important as the agency is called upon more often to address the aftermath of more extreme weather due to climate change. Now it faces a political storm as House and Senate leaders reconcile their different versions of the bill.

The Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, led by Sens. Susan 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.

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.

The Senate passed a rebuilt (and renamed – FEMA would become the U.S. Emergency Management Agency) service that includes 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. The new agency would have distinct-entity status that will protect its budget and give it the independence experienced now by the Coast Guard, which is also a distinct entity under the department. It would be given regional “strike teams” of emergency responders from all levels of government who train together.

Most important, the new agency would reintegrate 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.

The 87-11 vote for the Collins-Lieberman bill, however, doesn’t assure it will pass out of the House-Senate conference intact. The largest distinction between the two is that the House bill would move FEMA out of DHS, an understandable reaction to fears of bureaucracy but also a major mistake. One of the lessons of Katrina was FEMA’s lack of communication within DHS. Former FEMA head Michael Brown no longer is director in part because of that.

But within DHS are offices for medical response, energy security, weather-hazard information systems and the Coast Guard, among other emergency-related services. Removing FEMA from the department would either require even more difficult levels of communication or the duplication of these services. Neither option is desirable.

Sen. Collins was persuasive in bringing around senators who earlier supported making FEMA a wholly separate agency, and she will have similar political debates with the House. Given the growing importance of FEMA in an integrated department, they are debates she should win.