FEMA's Travails

A bipartisan Senate panel says FEMA is so screwed up that it cannot be saved in its present form, and ought to be abolished. Maybe that's true. But I can't help wondering to what extent the Bush administration bears direct blame for reducing FEMA to its current miserable state.

Why? As we learned in the immediate Katrina aftermath, five of the eight top FEMA officials were political appointees who lacked emergency management experience. This is the single revelation that soured me on this administration; the Harriet Miers debacle only solidified my belief that this is an administration that values loyalty over merit. On PBS Frontline last year, former FEMA director (under Clinton) James Lee Witt, a professional emergency responder, talked about how he reformed the agency to make it more responsive, but how after 9/11, the Bush Administration let it all fall away. You might say: of course he'd say that, he's a Clinton guy. But I have to say, after 9/11, it is jaw-dropping to me that the Administration would go back to business as usual with the federal government's emergency management agency, and send political cronies in to run it.

What I'd like to know is: was FEMA broken before the Bush administration came in to "fix" it by turning it over to purely political appointees and folding into the Dept of Homeland Security? Perhaps it was, but before I can be convinced that FEMA is unfixable, I'd like to know how it got to be so broken.