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From http://www.sfbg.com/38/52/news_fema.html :
Long before this hurricane season, some emergency managers inside and outside of government started sounding an alarm that still rings loudly. Bush administration policy changes and budget cuts, they say, are sapping FEMA's long-term ability to cushion the blow of hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, wildfires, and other natural disasters.
Since 2001, key federal disaster mitigation programs, developed over many years, have been slashed and tossed aside. FEMA's Project Impact, a model mitigation program created by the Clinton administration, has been canceled outright. Federal funding of post-disaster mitigation efforts designed to protect people and property from the next disaster has been cut in half, and now communities across the country must compete for pre-disaster mitigation dollars.
In addition, the White House has pushed for privatization of essential government services, including disaster management, and merged FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security, where natural disaster programs are often sidelined by counterterrorism programs. Along the way, morale at FEMA has plummeted, and many of the agency's most experienced personnel have left for work in other government agencies or private corporations.
In June, Pleasant Mann, a 16-year FEMA veteran who heads the agency's government employee union, wrote members of Congress to warn of the agency's decay. "Over the past three-and-one-half years, FEMA has gone from being a model agency to being one where funds are being misspent, employee morale has fallen, and our nation's emergency management capability is being eroded," he wrote. "Our professional staff are being systematically replaced by politically connected novices and contractors."
"Mitigation is the cornerstone of emergency management," a FEMA Web site explains today. "It's the ongoing effort to lessen the impact disasters have on people's lives and property." Under mitigation plans, houses in floodplains are moved or raised above the flood line, buildings are designed to withstand hurricane winds and earthquakes, and communities are relocated away from likely wildfire zones. According to FEMA estimates, every dollar spent on mitigation saves roughly $2 in disaster recovery costs.
William Waugh, a disaster expert at Georgia State University who has written training programs for FEMA, warns that the rise of a "consultant culture" has not served emergency programs well. "It's part of a widespread problem of government contracting out capabilities," he says. "Pretty soon governments can't do things because they've given up those capabilities to the private sector. And private corporations don't necessarily maintain those capabilities."
By ignoring the logic of fully funded mitigation and other preparedness programs, Bush's first FEMA director earned some scorn among emergency specialists. "Allbaugh? He was inept," says Claire Rubin, a senior researcher at George Washington University's Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management. "He was chief of staff for Bush in Texas – that was his credential. He didn't have an emergency management background, other than the disasters he ran into in Texas, and he wasn't a very open guy. He didn't want to learn anything."
The merger into the DHS has compounded the agency's problems, says FEMA employee and union president Mann. "Before, we reported straight to the White House, and now we've got this elaborate bureaucracy on top of us, and a lot of this bureaucracy doesn't think what we're doing is that important, because terrorism isn't our number one," he says. "The biggest frustration here is that we at FEMA have responded to disasters like Oklahoma City and 9/11, and here are people who haven't responded to a kitchen fire telling us how to deal with terrorism. You know, there were a lot of people who fell down on the job on 9/11, but it wasn't us."
Rubin, the George Washington University researcher, agrees with these assessments. "DHS has done a number of things to FEMA that are making it very, very hard for FEMA to function as it used to," she says. "A large number of people who are experienced with natural hazards no longer are doing that primarily or at all."
In 2003, Congress approved a White House proposal to cut FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Grant Program in half. Previously, the federal government was committed to invest 15 percent of the recovery costs of a given disaster in mitigating future problems. Under the Bush formula, the feds now cough up only 7.5 percent.
Such post-disaster mitigation efforts, specialists say, are a crucial way of minimizing future losses. It's after a disaster strikes, they argue, that the government can best take the steps necessary to avoid repeat problems, because that's when officials and storm victims are most receptive to mitigation plans.
The administration also argues that its new pre-disaster mitigation grants, which are awarded on a competitive basis, will help states pick up the slack. But again, emergency managers say it's not enough. In recent congressional testimony, a NEMA representative noted that "in a purely competitive grant program, lower income communities, those most often at risk to natural disaster, will not effectively compete with more prosperous cities.... The prevention of repetitive damages caused by disasters would go largely unprepared in less-affluent and smaller communities."
And indeed, some in-need areas have been inexplicably left out of the program. "In a sense, Louisiana is the floodplain of the nation," a 2002 FEMA report noted. "Louisiana waterways drain two thirds of the continental United States. Precipitation in New York, the Dakotas, even Idaho and the Province of Alberta, finds its way to Louisiana's coastline." As a result, flooding is a constant threat, and the state has an estimated 18,000 buildings that have repeatedly been damaged by flood waters – the highest number of any state. And yet, this summer FEMA denied Louisiana communities' pre-disaster mitigation funding requests.
In Jefferson Parish, part of the New Orleans metropolitan area, flood zone manager Tom Rodrigue is baffled by the development. "You would think we would get maximum consideration" for the funds, he says. "This is what the grant program called for. We were more than qualified for it."
Within FEMA, the shift away from mitigation programs is so pronounced that many longtime specialists in the field have quit. "The priority is no longer on prevention," says the FEMA administrator. "Mitigation, honestly, is the orphaned step-child. People are leaving it in droves."
In fact, disaster professionals are leaving many parts of FEMA in droves, compromising the agency's ability to do its job.
In case Congress hasn't gotten the message, former FEMA director Witt recently restated it in strong terms. "I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded," he testified at a March 24, 2004, hearing on Capitol Hill. "I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared. In fact one state emergency manager told me, 'It is like a stake has been driven into the heart of emergency management.'"
Waugh, the Georgia State University expert, says, "This is an exposed nerve in the emergency management community, in the sense that resources have been shifted away from hurricanes, tornadoes and other kinds of disasters – the kind of disasters that are more likely to occur than terrorism."
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