Begin forwarded message:
From: Art Botterell <acb at incident.com> Date: September 3, 2005 10:01:44 PM EDT To: dave at farber.net 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
"Finish your beer. There are sober kids in India."
-- rwmartin