[IP] A personal history of federal disaster response
Begin forwarded message:
From: Art Botterell <acb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: September 3, 2005 10:01:44 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: A personal history of federal disaster response
Dave -
[This is how I tried to explain things, speaking personally from my
experience as a former FEMA field operative and occasional DHS
consultant over the past decade, to some of my dot-com industry
friends earlier this week...]
In 1992 Hurricane Andrew devastated Florida, and the images and
soundbites from the streets of Homestead were not unlike what we're
seeing now (minus the standing water, of course.) It was during the
Andrew aftermath that Miami-Dade county's emergency director, Kate
Hale, famously asked of FEMA "Where's the cavalry?"
Then, as now, FEMA's explanation was that its only responsibility was
to provide support to the state when requested. While technically
accurate under a strict interpretation of the Stafford Act (FEMA's
authorizing legislation, authored by future DHS Director Tom Ridge),
that excuse was widely dismissed as inadequate. (Even back in 1989,
after Hurricane Hugo, Senator Hollings of South Carolina had
characterized FEMA as "the sorriest bunch of bureaucratic jackasses I
have ever encountered.")
For years thereafter, Andrew became FEMA's in-house codeword for a
reactive and bureaucratic approach that met the letter of the law,
but not public needs or expectations. And over the next five years
FEMA became, quite genuinely, an agency reborn. (I won't ramble
about the good old days of the James Lee Witt period, but if anyone
needs a reminder see <http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/
0101/011601fema.htm>)
Alas, FEMA's success was, to some extent, its undoing. Once spotlit
by the Clinton administration as a sterling example of what
government was good for, conservative proponents of the "starve the
beast" school of tax-cut-forced government downsizing couldn't help
but find an effective FEMA rhetorically inconvenient.
And then came 9/11. FEMA was subsumed into a law-enforcement
dominated Department of Homeland Security and many of the "old
timers" were eased (or sometimes shoved) aside. The new focus was on
feeding a traumatized public's craving for assurance that they'd
never be hurt again. The message was war on terrorism, and natural
disasters just weren't a priority. (California, in particular, was
welcome to drop into the Pacific at its earliest convenience.)
In fact, the idea that bad things might sometimes happen to God's
chosen people, seemingly at God's own hand, was worse than not-a-
priority... it was "off message," which in the tightly message-
disciplined Bush Administration was the most deadly of sins.
Also, there was the money. Take away the tax cuts, and the war
spending, and there was still enough Homeland Security money on the
table for some sharp elbows to be thrown in its pursuit.
"Boots and suits" (and also new walkie-talkies, command vans and
biohazard detection gear) for the largely conservative base of local
police and firefighters ate up the bulk of the first round of
Homeland Security grants, and the major defense contractors retooled
their PowerPoint decks to capture a lot of the rest of such money as
actually was spent. (There's a big difference on Capitol Hill
between money that gets "authorized" and money that actually gets
"appropriated." And another at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue
between appropriations and actual expenditures.)
And so we've returned to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when
domestic resilience was an afterthought to geopolitical power and the
military-industrial-police complex. Except that in our current era
of hyper-capitalism most of the slack resources we used to count on
to get us through tough stretches have been squeezed out of the
system (think "just in time inventory," "outsourcing" and "vanishing
middle class.")
Still, America is God's own beacon of truth, beauty and freedom to
the world, so I guess if anyone's suffering, it must be their own
fault somehow...
- Art
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