From International Herald Tribune:
Brazen bureaucracy
Published: September 13, 2007
The Bush administration seems intent on flouting Congress' mandate to restore the primacy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in dealing with disasters. At the core of the government's dreadful performance when Katrina crushed New Orleans two years ago was the confusion of responsibility in which the new and untested Department of Homeland Security superseded FEMA as the manager of disaster response.
To repair this problem, Congress passed a reform act last year specifying FEMA as the main coordinator for emergencies. Nevertheless, homeland security has issued its own disaster policy statement claiming the coordinator's role for its own department secretary.
The new homeland security policy amounts to a disaster on paper. It breezes past valuable proposals from state and local disaster managers and first responders. It threatens to compound bureaucratic inertia by creating 15 regional disaster areas with separate operational and strategic plans.
Homeland security officials defend their plan as merely a draft open to change. But they're throwing down the gauntlet before Congress. Some angry members are threatening to strip FEMA entirely from under the homeland umbrella. Far better that Congress defend its own primacy by firmly establishing that America is a nation of law, not runaway executives.
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