Homeland Defense Journal - January 2009 - 36

POINT By Senator Joseph I. Lieberman FEMA Is Not the Same Agency it Was in 2005 S A NEW ADMINISTRATION prepares to take the reins of government, Washington is rife with expectations about the changes President Elect Barack Obama will make. One change our new President should not make is relocating the Federal Emergency Management Agency outside the Department of Homeland Security. In 2002, when Congress worked to establish the Department to prevent and respond to terror attacks and natural disasters, the goal was to increase cooperation and integration among the more than 20 federal agencies that have responsibility for our homeland security. FEMA, which had taken the lead for emergency management since 1979, was intended to be at the core of this new, uniﬁed focus on protecting Americans where they live and work. It hasn’t worked as well as we had hoped. But FEMA certainly is a lot better than it used to be. The September 11 terrorist attacks and the widespread destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina made clear that preparing for and responding to the types of catastrophes that now threaten our country require unprecedented coordination between federal, state, and local agencies, as well as the private sector. That is difﬁcult under the best of circumstances, and it will be near impossible if FEMA and the stillmaturing Department of Homeland Security are separated. It is true that, in the post-September 11 climate, when everyone was justiﬁably worried about the next terrorist attack, FEMA got lost within DHS. The Administration failed to fund it adequately and made the mistake of taking away its responsibilities for preparing for the next disaster even though it would be responsible for managing the response. After Katrina, FEMA separatists stepped up their efforts to strip it from the Department and return it to what they thought were “the good old days” when it was an independent, Cabinet-level agency with direct access to the Oval Ofﬁce. But even when it was independent, FEMA had never been able to respond to a catastrophe the size and scope of Hurricane Katrina, which killed over 1,800 people, and cost $70 billion to $130 billion in damages, according to the Congressional Budget Ofﬁce. The worst disaster it had ever faced up until then was Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which killed 65 people and, according to CBO, cost about $38 billion in damages. A year after Andrew, a General Accounting Ofﬁce assessment of the agency’s performance “raised serious doubts about whether FEMA is capable of responding to catastrophic disasters.” And the agency’s general lack of preparedness was one reason the Hart-Rudman Commission in 2001 proposed a new Department of Homeland Security, with FEMA at its core, and why I and others introduced legislation creating such a Department in 2002. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee launched an exhaustive investigation into what went wrong with the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. After seven months, two dozen hearings, the examination of 838,000 documents, and the A publication of a 700-page report, the Committee found maddening failures at the local, state, and federal levels. Based on that knowledge, we proceeded to write and adopt legislation that, in the future, would be equipped to handle a catastrophic disaster, natural or terrorist, and do a much better job of responding to a “normal” disaster as well. The fact is that FEMA is not the same agency today that it was in 2005. As a result of our Post Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006, signed into law by President Bush, FEMA has transformed itself into a stronger, more accountable, and more coordinated agency. It has been elevated to a special status within DHS - like the Coast Guard - so that its authorities and assets cannot be changed without Congressional approval and its administrator is the President’s principle advisor in an emergency. The legislation required that top FEMA ofﬁcials have relevant emergency management experience, so that it would never again be saddled with inexperienced political appointees. We reunited the agency’s preparedness duties with its response functions, and gave FEMA responsibility for dispensing $2 billion in homeland security grants, so that the people who work with state and local ofﬁcials to prepare and train for crises would be the same people who work with state and local ofﬁcials to respond to them. And we greatly strengthened FEMA’s 10 regional ofﬁces. The agency – and DHS overall - still need improvement. But the reforms are working. FEMA’s response to the 2008 hurricane season and other post Katrina disasters has been effective because it was able to mobilize resources quickly and seamlessly from throughout DHS, from the Transportation Security Administration to Customs and Border Protection to the Coast Guard, to respond to fast-changing events on the ground. Rather than relying on nostalgia for the “good old days” that never were and splintering apart agencies that work together well now, the President-elect should allow FEMA to continue to rebuild itself into the best disaster preparedness and response agency in the world. n Senator Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., is the Chairman of the Senate Committee for Homeland Security and Government Affairs 34 | Homeland Defense Journal Visit www.homelanddefensejournal.com

Homeland Defense Journal - January 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Homeland Defense Journal - January 2009