How FEMA Changed
WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 – In December of 1999, a homeless person overturned a candle in an abandoned warehouse in Worcester starting a devastating fire that raged for 20 hours and cost six firefighters their lives. Rep. Jim P. McGovern, D-Worcester, said the blaze exhausted not only the Worcester fire department but other area fire departments, as well.
McGovern last week recalled asking President Clinton for federal help. “‘I’m going to have James Lee Witt call you in two seconds, don’t move from that phone,’” McGovern recalled Clinton saying. “And he did.”
He said that Mr. Witt, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, asked what Worcester needed, even if it was a box of donuts for the volunteers.
FEMA’s contribution to the Worcester fire was part of what was viewed as the agency’s reformation. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the agency’s response to disasters had prompted many lawmakers to suggest disbanding it.
FEMA could “screw up a two-car parade,” then-Rep. Norman Y. Mineta said in 1989, referring to the agency’s response to a major earthquake in San Francisco that year. Sen. Ernest F. Hollings, D-South Carolina, called FEMA officials, “the sorriest bunch of bureaucratic jackasses,” after Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
But by the end of that decade, the agency had won over many critics. Now, in the wake of a heavily-criticized response to Hurricane Katrina, the agency is under fire once more.
After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks FEMA was made part of the new Department of Homeland Security, a move that has come under close scrutiny. But Mary Margaret Walker, a spokeswoman for FEMA, argued that local and state officials in Florida would say that FEMA was better able to work with them during last year’s hurricane season than during Andrew, adding that that proves having FEMA be part of Homeland Security is not a hindrance.
Richard Krimm, who served as FEMA’s associate director of response and recovery until 1998, said that changes were made at FEMA during the Clinton administration that helped turn the agency around. Clinton thought FEMA was important from the beginning of his administration, Krimm said, and appointed Mr. Witt, whom Krimm called the best emergency manager in the history of FEMA.
Mr. Witt had served as the head of the Arkansas Office of Emergency Services prior to his appointment, and is the only FEMA director to date to bring emergency management experience to the job. Clinton made Witt an ex officio member of the cabinet, and “people knew he had the backing of the president,” Mr. Krimm said.
As a result, other departments cooperated with FEMA. Mr. Krimm was with Mr. Witt during the Mississippi River flood of 1993, when Mr. Witt called the secretary of defense to ask for planes, and they came.
Mr. Witt was also the first FEMA director to explicitly state the agency’s mission which was to coordinate the federal government’s response to all hazards and to “reduce the risk to life and property,” noted Jerry Ellig of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia.
Departments were established under Mr. Witt to oversee preparedness, response, recovery and evacuation after a disaster, said Mr. Ellig, who recently wrote a study on FEMA. Lower-level inspectors were given the authority to assess damage and process claims, eliminating reviews, he said, but increasing accuracy. In all, four layers of management were eliminated under Mr. Witt.
But FEMA’s response to Katrina “could have been the early ’90’s again,”Mr. Ellig said. He said he does not know what changed, but that several possibilities presented themselves.
Maybe, as the administration claims, the disaster was so big that any FEMA would have been overwhelmed by it, he said. Or perhaps Joe Allbaugh, President Bush’s first appointee to head FEMA, who had famously called the agency an “oversized entitlement program,” had undone some of Mr. Witt’s innovations.
When FEMA became part of the Homeland Security Department in 2002, Mr. Ellig said, it was “one of the world’s largest mergers” and layers of management were added above FEMA. Maybe the extra bureaucracy made the agency less flexible.
Mr. Ellig and Mr. Krimm both point to an exodus of career FEMA workers during the Bush administration. Mr. Krimm said his former colleagues found Allbaugh “harsh,” and took early retirement or otherwise left the agency. Disaster reservists available to be deployed to disaster regions have been reduced by more than half since President Bush took office, said Mr. Krimm, and some funding has been reapplied to terrorism prevention.
Leo Bosner, a 33-year veteran of FEMA, said the response division had been reduced from 60 employees to 40 over the past few years, with staff leaving and not being replaced, or being replaced with a “friend of a friend,” with no emergency management background. New staff is hired to work in Homeland Security, not disaster relief, said Mr. Bosner president of the FEMA Local of the American Federation of Government Employees.
Being part of the Homeland Security Department does not add much to the disaster relief department, other than “another layer of people who don’t know about emergency preparedness,” Mr. Bosner said.
In the 1990s his colleagues and he were proud to work in FEMA, he said, which was that rare thing: a “popular” government agency. Now he characterizes them as “demoralized and disgusted.”
“If I were a conspiracy theorist I’d think this was all part of a horrible plot,” said Mr. Bosner. “But I don’t. I just think it’s incompetence.”
