Goodbye, 'Brownie'

[norml]

Goodbye, 'Brownie'


Tuesday, September 13, 2005; Page A26

NO ONE WILL be sorry or surprised to learn that Michael D. Brown, formerly the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, intends to spend more time with his family. Mr. Brown will be forever remembered as the man who, at the height of the New Orleans evacuation crisis, appeared not to know that 25,000 people were crammed into the city's convention center without food, water or toilets, despite television reports broadcasting that fact for the previous 24 hours. Since then, his qualifications -- which mostly consist of a long stint running horse shows, as well as a useful friendship with a friend of the president -- have sparked a good deal of righteous indignation. But Mr. Brown's parting words are worth heeding. "The focus," he said yesterday, "has got to be on FEMA."

We agree -- although we would add that the focus should be on presidential attention to FEMA, as well as congressional oversight and funding of FEMA, and not on FEMA's position in the federal bureaucracy. Last week, a gaggle of mostly Democratic lawmakers proposed bills that would, among other things, move FEMA out of the Department of Homeland Security, making it once again a separate agency, and give it Cabinet-level status. Yet most of the bad decisions made about FEMA over the past several years -- budget cuts, the plan to take away its preparedness function, as well as the decision to staff it with presidential cronies instead of experts -- could have occurred even if FEMA had remained in the Cabinet: After all, presidents have been known to ignore their Cabinet members, too.

By the same token, some of those decisions could have been prevented, even with FEMA buried deep in the bowels of DHS, had anyone in the White House or Congress taken the agency's agenda more seriously. As we wrote yesterday, Mr. Brown received only a 42-minute Senate confirmation hearing when he was nominated to be deputy director of FEMA, and no hearing at all when he became its boss. The White House, preoccupied with al Qaeda, and former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, preoccupied with airline security, were clearly unperturbed by the threats posed by hurricanes and floods.


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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/12/AR2005091201596.html

[struggle4progress]

1. He's been replaced by Mr. Duct Tape. eom