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Re: Michael Brown
I’m glad to see there’s somebody out there who’s not a knee-jerk Brown-basher Mr Lowry. The elephant in the middle of the room no one seems to see is that the FEMA-DHS problem was created by Congress. In creating DHS they gave DHS the same statutory authority and responsibility for emergency planning and response as FEMA and then folded FEMA in to DHS without modifying Dir-FEMA’s statutory authority and responsibility.
This is yet another of a series of predictable cultural and statutory clashes created by the establishment of DHS. That doesn’t mean DHS is a bad idea or that FEMA can (or can’t) work inside DHS, nor does it mean FEMA should be a standalone agency, it just means Congress wrote legislation putting DHS in charge of functions that FEMA was already in charge of making it awfully hard for any Constitutionally appointed officer to satisfy Congress and his new DHS boss and the same time.
The only way this would not have happened is if FEMA had been dis-established and its functional responsibilites assigned to DHS – probably still the best future choice, BTW.
On the other hand FEMA has struggled from its inception. Once upon a time all the disaster/emergency response things FEMA has tried to do and all the things DHS was created to do were done by the Office of Civil Defense in cooperation with DOD and state/local governments. The old system worked pretty well and Congress and various administrations have been working ever since its dissolution to recreate the planning, coordination, communication, and response capabilities that were in place and working before victories in the Cold War threw away the working system…