My friend, Bloomberg correspondent Mike Forsythe, has given me permission to reproduce his article on FEMA in full, as it's not easily available online:
FEMA Spoils System Leaves Few Experts Managing Crisis Agency
By Michael Forsythe
Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency's upper ranks are mostly staffed with people who share two traits: loyalty to President George W. Bush and little or no background in emergency management.
Director Michael Brown served as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association for a decade before coming to FEMA in 2001. Acting Deputy Director Patrick Rhode is a veteran of Bush's 2000 presidential campaign, and Acting Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks Altshuler worked in the White House in 2001 planning presidential trips.
The lack of experience among Brown's top lieutenants in responding to disasters was revealed by Hurricane Katrina, said Paul Light, a professor of organizational studies at New York University. It also marks a reversion to the days when the agency was treated as a ``turkey farm'' -- a place where political operatives could get high-level jobs -- after being led by professionals during
the Clinton administration, he said.
``These guys kind of have a deer-in-the headlights look; they haven't been through this kind of thing and it shows,'' said Light, the founding director of the Center for Public Service at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based research group. ``I'm afraid FEMA has gone backwards in time to the old era of a more traditional campaign-loyalty position.''
Under the Gun
Brown, 50, and his agency have come under fire from both Democrats and Republicans for responding slowly to Katrina, the storm that battered Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama and may have claimed thousands of lives.
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi urged Bush on Sept. 6 to fire Brown, saying he had ``absolutely no credentials.''
Federal officials last week defended the government's actions during the disaster, and Bush singled out Brown for praise. ``Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job,'' Bush said at a stop in Mobile, Alabama, on Sept. 2.
The top FEMA officials are well-qualified for their jobs, and they don't get them through a spoils system, said Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, yesterday.
''It's certainly not the case that the senior positions are rewards for political loyalty,'' Knocke said. ''There is experience in their background relevant for doing their jobs, whether in policy or management.''
Allbaugh and Brown
Bush, who during the 2000 presidential debates praised James Lee Witt, President Bill Clinton's FEMA director, chose Joseph Allbaugh, his campaign manager that year, as his first director of the agency. During Allbaugh's 2001 confirmation hearings, he told Congress he feared that federal disaster assistance was ``an oversized entitlement program.'' Brown, who became director
in 2003, was a college classmate of Allbaugh's.
Allbaugh, 53, now a consultant, was en route to Louisiana to help mobilize private support for disaster relief and couldn't be reached for comment. Brown, who traveled yesterday to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was unavailable to comment for this story.
Brown's biography on the White House Web site shows he has some experience in crisis management, having overseen emergency services divisions for the city of Edmond, Oklahoma, from 1975 to 1978. Allbaugh helped coordinate responses to natural disasters as Bush's chief of staff when Bush was governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000, according to Allbaugh's FEMA biography.
Those backgrounds don't measure up to that of Witt, who was head of the Arkansas Office of Emergency Services for four years when Clinton was governor, or to some emergency coordinators at the state level.
Experience
Henry Renteria, head of California's emergency-services administration, has more than two decades of experience in the field. Dave Liebersbach, director of the Alaska Division of Homeland Security, has four decades of experience.
Liebersbach, who said Brown ``pretty much knows what he's doing,'' suggested that the FEMA director's shortcomings derive more from his lack of experience in dealing with Congress. Also, unlike Witt, ``he doesn't have the president's ear,'' Liebersbach said.
Witt, who was hired last week by Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco to give advice on the hurricane recovery, ran FEMA when it was a cabinet-level position. FEMA was merged into the Department of Homeland Security, which is primarily focused on fighting terrorism, along with 21 other agencies in 2002.
Shakeup Hurt Agency
That shakeup, the largest U.S. government reorganization since the Department of Defense was created in 1947, has hurt the agency, Liebersbach said.
``There's been a huge demoralization of the professional FEMA staff,'' said Liebersbach, the outgoing president of the National Emergency Management Association, a Lexington, Kentucky-based group that represents state directors of emergency services.
Witt, who took the FEMA job in 1993, had managers with experience. His chief of staff, Jane Bullock, was a 22-year veteran of the agency when she left in 2001. One of Witt's deputy directors, Mike Walker, had been an employee of Democratic politicians, although he served as acting secretary of the Army before he came to the post and is a military veteran.
Advance Men
George Haddow, a research scientist specializing in disaster management, was deputy chief of staff under Bullock.
Brown's lieutenants lack that emergency planning background. During Bush's first presidential campaign, Rhode and former Deputy Chief of Staff Scott Morris worked in Austin, Texas, with Rhode serving as deputy director of national advance operations and Morris working as a media consultant, according to their FEMA biographies.
Rhode and Morris both worked at the U.S. Small Business Administration after Bush's 2001 inauguration. FEMA's chief of staff position has been vacant since Rhode left that job earlier this year to become acting deputy director.
Morris also worked for the Republican National Committee as an assistant to the executive director and was a media strategist for former Senator Robert Dole when he ran for president in 1996, according to his official biography.
Morris, now based in Orlando where he runs FEMA's efforts to help the state recover from a series of hurricanes in 2004, didn't return a phone call seeking comment.
`Senior Advance Representative'
Altshuler, 31, worked at the White House in 2001 as a ``senior advance representative'' earning $51,250 a year, according to a White House pay list published by the Washington Post at the time. Rhode and Altshuler couldn't be reached for comment.
Because of their backgrounds, the FEMA executives don't readily know which county officials are competent, which cities have the right equipment and who to call for specific needs, Light said.
``There is a profession of disaster preparedness,'' Light said. ``It is a well-developed profession. Witt came out of that community. Witt had a very good Rolodex, and at the end of the day, that's really important.''
Bullock said that in the pre-Witt era, FEMA was used as ``a dumping ground for political appointees if they didn't have a place to go.'' In the present administration, she said, `` the people who have gone to FEMA have not had the emergency management background to understand what needs to be done to respond to a disaster of the magnitude we're experiencing.''
--Editors: McQuillan, Jaroslovsky, Wolfson
Story illustration: For a map of Louisiana, see {MAPS <GO>} .
For more information about the state, including demographics and a link to its Web site, see USST <GO> . See http://www.nola.com/ for a menu of resources for victims of the storm. For the National Weather Service's National Hurricane Center Web site, see http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/. For FEMA's Web site, see http://www.fema.gov.
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