This is an interesting article about the evolution of FEMA that began under President George H.W. Bush and was realized and guided to fruition under President Clinton.

Doesn't the FEMA that we have been seeing on the news this past week sound like the old FEMA described in this article?

leaving nearly 200,000 residents homeless and 1.3 million without electricity. Food, clean water, shelter, and medical assistance were scarce. Yet, for the first three days, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is responsible for coordinating federal disaster relief, was nowhere to be found. And when FEMA did finally arrive, its incompetence further delayed relief efforts. Food and water distribution centers couldn't meet the overwhelming need; lines literally stretched for miles. Mobile hospitals arrived late. In everything it did, FEMA appeared to live up to the description once given to it by South Carolina Sen. Ernest Hollings: "the sorriest bunch of bureaucratic jackasses I've ever known."

Florida was slow to realize its own dire straits because many of its emergency workers were among the storm's victims. Half of the members of the Dade County Police and Fire Departments had lost their homes. Most of the area's fire and police stations were destroyed. Like their fellow southern Floridians, disaster management workers were looking for food, water, shelter, and medical care. The state was unable to issue specific requests for aid because it had no one available to assess the damage.

Finally, as the full extent of the damage--and the lack of federal action--prompted heavy criticism, President Bush circumvented FEMA and formed a hurricane task force led by Secretary of Transportation Andrew Card. Card and the task force flew down to Florida to assess the damage. As the Department of Transportation airplane passed over southern Florida, the members of the task force were stunned by the extent of the damage. "This eerie silence came over the plane as we flew over mile after mile of pure devastation," remembers Shelley Longmuir, the task force's chief of staff. "You got the feeling that you were no longer in the United States, but in some far away, mystical place because there were none of the reference points of civilization.... It looked like Beirut."

FEMA would have seen as much--had it bothered to look. Because of its reactive posture, it had never sent a team of damage assessors to survey the wreckage. Not until Card and the task force flew to Florida did the federal government have a true sense of the storm's impact.

Andrew Card pressed then Florida Governor Chiles to accept Federal aid and resources - not FEMA, but military aid. Once the regular troops hit the ground, the people felt it.

The next day 3,500 troops were in southern Florida, the first of 17,000 that would eventually serve. Almost immediately, Hale says, the situation changed. "The first thing that happened was the morale improved the minute that people felt they weren't alone, they weren't abandoned.... You could just see people find the strength to go one more day when they were at the point of collapse."

As life in southern Florida began its long march back to normalcy, Congress began to consider what should be done with FEMA. It was clear to many on Capitol Hill that it was time to either fix FEMA or do away with it altogether.

The agency was restructured and streamlined under President Clinton, earning itself a much better reputation for responding to catastrophies such as the Oklahoma City bombing.

Virtually overnight, the agency has developed a new reputation for quickness and efficiency. Gone are the bureaucratic swamps that the old FEMA had made its hallmark. It is telling that when state disaster officials talk about FEMA's response time, they no longer speak in days or weeks, but in hours. They speak of phone calls, not of forms dropped in the mail.

So how did the FEMA of today become so much like the animal that it used to be?

Is it simply because it was assigned to Homeland Security? Is it the leadership of UnderSecretary Michael Brown? Is it the political landscape of the Department of Homeland Security?

...or are the problems now entirely different?

I look forward to an independent commission's investigation. I disagree with Senator Hilary Clinton's suggestion to break FEMA away from Homeland Security. I think that we need to have one, unified command structure.

Our Intelligence failures in 9/11 should have convinced everyone by now that we need to all be on the same page.

...by the same token, if we have bloated the chain of command with burdensome bureaucracy, then we need to trim the fat and make things more efficient.

Posted by Michael at September 6, 2005 07:41 PM