NYT : Department of Brazen Bureaucracy

Department of Brazen Bureaucracy

September 13, 2007

The Bush administration seems intent on flouting Congress’s mandate to restore the primacy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in dealing with disasters. At the core of the government’s dreadful performance when Katrina crushed New Orleans two years ago was the confusion of responsibility in which the new and untested Department of Homeland Security superseded FEMA as the manager of disaster response.

To repair this glaring problem, Congress passed a bipartisan reform act last year firmly specifying FEMA as the main coordinator for national emergencies. Nevertheless, homeland security has just issued its own sweeping disaster policy statement claiming the coordinator’s role for its own department secretary.

Congress is properly furious. The administration’s latest exercise of in-your-face contumely would confirm the superagency, which includes FEMA in its organization chart, as a millstone rather than a bulwark in future disasters. The reform act sought to repair the lines of authority, bolster FEMA and prevent its slide toward a patronage-heavy underling agency.

The new homeland security policy — the already overdue “national response framework” — amounts to fresh disaster on paper. It not only ignores Congress’s vital mandate, but it breezes past a range of valuable proposals from state and local disaster managers and first responders. It threatens to compound bureaucratic inertia by creating 15 regional disaster areas with separate operational and strategic plans.

Homeland Security Department officials defend their plan as merely a draft open to hearings and change. But they’re throwing down the gauntlet before Congress. Some angry members are threatening to strip FEMA entirely from under the homeland umbrella. Far better that Congress defend its own primacy by establishing this finally is a nation of law, not runaway executives.