Fairies!

by hilzoy

Paul Krugman has a startling revelation: he has discovered who was really responsible for FEMA's performance during Hurricane Katrina. It was fairies! One fairy in particular:

"The U.S. government is being stalked by an invisible bandit, the Crony Fairy, who visits key agencies by dead of night, snatches away qualified people and replaces them with unqualified political appointees. There's no way to catch or stop the Crony Fairy, so our only hope is to change the agencies' names. That way she might get confused, and leave our government able to function.

That, at least, is how I interpret the report on responses to Hurricane Katrina that was just released by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

The report points out that the Federal Emergency Management Agency "had been operating at a more than 15 percent staff-vacancy rate for over a year before Katrina struck" — that means many of the people who knew what they were doing had left. And it adds that "FEMA's senior political appointees ... had little or no prior relevant emergency-management experience."

But the report says nothing about what caused the qualified people to leave and who appointed unqualified people to take their place. There's no hint that, say, President Bush might have had any role. So those political appointees must have been installed by the Crony Fairy.

Rather than trying to fix FEMA, the report calls for replacing it with a new organization, the National Preparedness and Response Agency. As far as I can tell, the new agency would have exactly the same responsibilities as FEMA. But "senior N.P.R.A. officials would be selected from the ranks of professionals with experience in crisis management." I guess it's impossible to select qualified people to run FEMA; if you try, the Crony Fairy will spirit them away and replace them with Michael Brown. But she might not know her way to N.P.R.A."

Seriously, the idea of abolishing FEMA right before hurricane season strikes me as monumentally dumb, especially since we have been here before. We considered dismantling FEMA in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. We did something else instead, and it worked. If we had a different President, we could do it again. With George W. Bush in office, however, not even changing the name will solve the underlying problem.

Here's the history, from a 1995 Washington Monthly article on FEMA:

First, a taste of the bad old days, back in the early 90s:

"In the wake of Hurricane Andrew, the criticisms were even more pointed. The Wall Street Journal ran a front page article that quoted a range of disaster specialists who thought that the agency was more trouble than it was worth; it would be better, they maintained, to dissolve the agency entirely than to try to reform it.

One of the most maddening problems with FEMA, the critics said, was the constant bureaucratic delay. FEMA workers would routinely hold up vital aid requests because the proper forms were not filled out or certain signatures had not been included. "If we had asked for a certain resource this way we could have gotten it," said Kate Hale, director of the Dade County Emergency Services of her experience after Hurricane Andrew, "but FEMA would say that we hadn't framed the question properly.... FEMA's employees appeared to be terrified at making a mistake, so they'd rather do nothing than make a mistake because a mistake could cost them their career."

It was a problem that had long dogged FEMA. In 1990, as Hurricane Hugo hurtled towards Puerto Rico with winds of 120 miles per hour, Governor Rafael Hernandez-Colon sent the proper federal aid request forms to FEMA headquarters in Washington. One scrupulous bureaucrat, however, noticed that the governor had failed to check one section of the form. Dutifully, the FEMA worker sent the request back--via the U.S. mail. The returned forms did not reach the governor until after Hugo hit. As Puerto Ricans were cleaning up the mess left by their worst hurricane this century, Governor Hernandez-Colon was forced to re-file the request forms and send them, once again, through the mail. Federal aid was held up for days."

Can you imagine this? It's downright surreal.

"The red tape was aggravated by old-fashioned incompetence. FEMA was, in the words of former advisory board member and defense analyst Lawrence Korb, a "political dumping ground," a backwater reserved for political contributors or friends with no experience in emergency management. President Bush, for example, appointed Wallace Stickney, head of New Hampshire's Department of Transportation, to lead FEMA. Stickney's only apparent qualification for the post was that he was a close friend and former next door neighbor of Bush Chief of Staff John Sununu. Throughout his time there, Stickney was nearly invisible, except for regular trips to Capitol Hill to defend the agency against its many critics.

Because FEMA had 10 times the proportion of political appointees of most other government agencies, the poorly chosen Bush appointees had a profound effect on the performance of the agency. Sam Jones, the mayor of Franklin, Louisiana, says he was shocked to find that the damage assessors sent to his town a week after Hurricane Andrew had no disaster experience whatsoever. "They were political appointees, members of county Republican parties hired on an as-needed basis.... They were terribly inexperienced.""

Does this have a familiar ring to it? People with no disaster management experience but lots of political connections appointed to crucial disaster management posts... Bureaucratic idiocies getting in the way of helping people in need... a President named Bush...

As I said, people were calling for FEMA to be disbanded. But it wasn't. Instead, my Senator, Barbara Mikulski, asked the GAO to come up with a serious plan for reform, and threatened to cut their funding if they didn't. The GAO discovered that FEMA had a lot of authority that it had never bothered to use, and that what it needed was a refocussed sense of its mission and the willingness to be a lot more proactive. And then:

"The report caught a bit of luck in November 1992 with the election of Bill Clinton. The model for FEMA fit nicely with the new president's notion of an activist federal government. To implement this change in mission, the President appointed James Lee Witt as the agency's director. An unassuming and direct man, Witt was a former construction company owner and county judge who had worked with Clinton in Arkansas as the director of the state Office of Emergency Services. As state director, he had earned high marks for the successful management of three presidential disaster declarations, including two major floods in 1990 and 1991.

Witt's first challenge was to assemble a staff to direct the new FEMA. (...) The high number of political appointees allowed the new administration to free itself of the incompetents and replace them with talented new people. Clinton agreed to let Witt interview all potential appointees to ensure that they were qualified for the jobs. As a result, the resumes of the team they assembled are formidable. Elaine McReynolds, head of the Federal Insurance Administration served as the insurance commissioner of Tennessee for over seven years. Richard Moore, a former state legislator from Massachusetts, was appointed to help make state and local governments better prepared for disasters. Carrye Brown, head of the Fire Administration, had worked on Capitol Hill for 18 years where she was a specialist in disaster and fire legislation.

With a new mandate and the staff to go with it, Witt conducted a top-to-bottom review of FEMA's mission, its personnel, and its resources. The review brought swift changes. In its first two years, the agency shut down several unneeded field offices. It reduced internal regulations by 12 percent and drafted a plan to reduce them by 50 percent by the end of 1995. It strengthened programs that prepared states for natural disasters. And, so it could better inform state directors what aid was available, FEMA conducted the first comprehensive inventory in the agency's history.

Recognizing the unlikelihood of a massive nuclear attack, Witt also moved the agency out of the nuclear war business, making available to natural disaster responses many of the resources the agency had accumulated in preparation for a Soviet attack. One hundred FEMA disaster specialists were freed up to deal with natural catastrophes.

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."

Think of it: qualified people! What a concept! And the results:

"Consider the Oklahoma City bombing. Tom Feuerborne, director of Oklahoma's Civil Emergency Management Department, can cite the events of April 19, 1995 almost down to the minute. It was 9:02 a.m. when a truck bomb ripped through the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building in downtown Oklahoma City. At 9:30, Feuerborne placed a phone call to FEMA's headquarters in Washington. At 2:05, FEMA's advance team arrived, complete with damage assessors and members of Witt's staff. Six hours later, at 8:10 that evening, Witt himself arrived to be briefed on the situation. By 2:30 a.m. April 20, the first of FEMA's search and rescue teams had arrived to supplement the efforts of the Oklahoma City fire department. Says Feuerborne, "My office is very happy with the quick response of FEMA."

Ellen Gordon, administrator of Iowa's Emergency Management Division, has a similarly uncanny memory when it comes to FEMA's response to the Midwestern floods of 1993. Shortly after midnight on Sunday, July 11, she received a call from L.D. McMullen, the general manager of the Des Moines Water Works. Their operation was at the point of collapse, he said. The 250,000 citizens of Des Moines would soon lose all of their water.

One year earlier, Gordon would have mailed federal relief request forms to Washington, where, as Puerto Rico's Governor Hernandez-Colon discovered, they may have received a less-than-speedy response. But all Gordon had to do was place a phone call to the FEMA disaster field office located in Davenport. Early Sunday morning, FEMA officials arrived in Des Moines, and, by 11:30 a.m., they had determined a plan of action. By that evening, 29 water distribution centers had been established. The next morning, the first of 30 self-contained water purification machines arrived. For the next two-and-a-half weeks, the Des Moines Water Works was inoperable, but the city had all the water it needed. "Nothing sticks out in our minds that we had to haggle over or justify," says Gordon. "Whenever we asked for assistance it was there."

It is a sentiment shared by virtually all those involved with the response to the midwestern floods. At a Congressional hearing in October 1993 to appraise FEMA's performance, congressmen and state disaster officials who testified praised FEMA's efforts and marveled at the turnaround Witt had engineered. Missouri State Emergency Management Director Jerry Uhlmann said that, "this flood showcased FEMA's new commitment and successful efforts in disaster response to catastrophic events." And, as disasters are bipartisan, the response to FEMA's success has been as well. "I haven't spent a lot of time complimenting the President on his appointments," said Oklahoma Republican Daniel Inhofe, "but I sure did on this one.""

And that's what matters: when people needed FEMA, it came through for them. No haggling, no wondering where on earth the federal government might be, and certainly no forms returned by mail because some box was left unchecked. Just an agency actually doing, gasp, its job, and doing it well. That was FEMA as of January, 2001, when the Crony Fairy arrived. Because, as Krugman says, "the Crony Fairy is named George W. Bush."

***

Now, six short years later, a bipartisan committee headed by a Republican says this:

"The Federal Emergency Management Agency was so fundamentally dysfunctional during Hurricane Katrina that Congress should abolish it and create a new disaster response agency from scratch, according to a draft of bipartisan recommendations proposed by a Senate committee."

If you think about it, that's breathtaking. Six years of President Bush's leadership have so completely destroyed a once functional agency that it cannot be fixed, and must be abolished completely. You don't have to agree with the conclusion -- and as I said, I don't -- to find that pretty amazing.

But I don't think that creating a new agency will fix anything. What would do the trick is to appoint qualified people, not political hacks, and let them do their job. But that's not going to happen under this administration. If you live in a hurricane-prone area, you'll just have to pray to the deity of your choice, and wait for 2008.

Comments

[Jimbo]

Sometimes you have to kill the patient to cure the disease.

[platosearwax]

Really good post, Hilzoy. I don't say that enough (I don't say anything enough, but that's another story).

[Delicious Pundit]

Though if the Crony Fairy is Bush, the name-change dodge might actually work.

[lily]

One of the uncovered stories of this Presidency is the damage done by the Republicans to every federal agency: BLM, Forest Service, EPA, etc.

I doubt that Homeland Security amounts to much, either.

So why do people think Bush is keeping us safe from terrorists?

[Bernard Yomtov]

I don't think that creating a new agency will fix anything.

Of course it won't. This is a standard stupid corporate move. Business not going well? Don't worry about sales, expenses, product design, etc. No.

Reorganize!! Change the signs on the doors. That'll fix it.

[Dantheman]

Disclaimer: when I dealt with FEMA following my house flooding in 2004, they did their jobs in inspecting the damage and processing requests for both payment and loans perfectly fine and I have no complaints about them.

The history of FEMA seems to follow so many other federal agencies: incompetent in the Reagan/Bush years, competent in the Clinton years, and incompetent again in this decade. Only a blinkered partisan could find any correlation here.

[dmbeaster]

Just another example of the Party of Ideas hard at work with all their Good Ideas.

They also say that the reason for the current budget shortfall is that the mean old Crony Fairy is no longer leaving quarters under their pillows, unlike during the 90s when the Republican Crony Fairy enabled them to balance the budget (its so wrong that Clinton and Dems try to take credit for that!).

[togolosh]

The flipside of the Crony Fairy is the total failure of Congress to exercise its oversight function.

[angela]

Fema was one of several organizations that was significantly improved during the Clinton administration. So was the VA. They both must be destroyed.

The rightist ideology is that government is part of the problem and successful efforts at governance must be destroyed to make it so.