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Rescuing FEMA

The Federal Emergency Management Agency needs more than new leadership. It needs a dramatic and thorough overhaul.

The best decision Michael Brown made as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was to resign. He was unqualified for the job and quickly became the symbol for the Bush administration's slow, inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina. But Brown's departure should be only the beginning of a thorough overhaul of an agency desperate for leadership and direction.

President Bush took a positive step by naming R. David Paulison, former chief of the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department, as acting FEMA director. Paulison received favorable reviews for his work in Miami-Dade following Hurricane Andrew, and he has experience that Brown lacked. Whether its Paulison or someone else, Brown's permanent successor must bring more to the job than political connections. Other top FEMA officials whose only credentials are working for Bush's campaign also should be swept out and replaced with professionals.

New leadership won't cure all of FEMA's ills. It moves too slowly. It gets tangled up in its own rules, tying up the relief it is supposed to provide and frustrating local officials. Some 1,000 firefighters were told to gather in Atlanta, then wound up taking a sexual harassment class before being sent to ravaged communities to distribute FEMA fliers rather than rescue residents. Medical units shuffled from town to town and treated a single patient. Then there are the 200 tractor-trailers leased by FEMA to bring ice and water to the Gulf Coast that spent a week driving around before winding up at a storage site in Memphis. The agency is supposed to facilitate relief, not prevent it from reaching those whose lives depend on it.

Now FEMA is frantically building temporary cities of mobile homes for 200,000 Gulf Coast residents who can't go home. It is spending tens of billions on the recovery effort, and its track record for managing money is less than stellar. After Hurricane Frances last year, the Homeland Security inspector general found, the agency improperly spent $31-million in largely unaffected Miami-Dade County. Congress will receive weekly spending reports, and Homeland Security auditors and investigators are being sent to the Gulf Coast. But it will take more oversight than that to keep fraud and waste to a minimum.

Four days after Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, Bush stood beside his FEMA director and declared: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." Twelve days after that, Brown resigned after being relieved of Katrina duties and sent back to Washington. The agency itself needs a transformation that is equally dramatic.

[Last modified September 14, 2005, 02:15:34]