3 The Government Response
The First FEMA

The federal response to disasters has been predictably late, reactive rather than proactive, accommodating to the special interests of business and Congress, and unable to enforce penalties for failing to take obvious precautions. This is predictable for at least two reasons. One is that there is no unified constituency for the variety of disasters that can occur that would demand planning over a long time horizon; consequently, the government is often reacting to rather than anticipating disasters. As federal involvement increased in the second half of the twentieth century, each major event fostered new laws and the creation of new organizations, sometimes to be folded into the next reorganization, or just left hanging loose, trying to hold on to their constituency. This evolution does not invite proactive, long-range planning.

The second problem is that there are too many constituencies who are competing among themselves and unwilling to make the changes that reform would require. Disasters mean money will be passed out and political decisions made about rebuilding; many different players are attracted to the disaster scene. The large sums given out invite corruption, but more important, the emergency and rebuilding funds can be distributed according to political and economic interests rather than need. These interests include the terms of rebuilding such as condemnation of buildings and of land, building codes, and zoning ordinances; new equipment for official first responders (fire, police, etc.); and insurance requirements and regulation of the insurance industry. These reflect the interests of government agencies and their constituents, and of economic elites in general. And finally, the succession of organizations set up to deal with disasters creates organizational opportunities for unrelated political ventures (e.g., limiting personal privacy, privatization of government) and economic ones (e.g., firms marketing their products).

Thus, there is little incentive, because of the short-term interests of organizations in the public and the private sector, to utilize a long-term perspective that would assess the built-in vulnerabilities of the nation, such as concentrations of hazmats or populations that cannot be evacuated, so we are reactive rather than proactive. Short-term interests seize on disasters as opportunities to be exploited. It is a basic premise of this book that organizations are tools; they can be used for many things other than their official mandate. Since disasters involve most everything in society, the interests that can be served by organizations involved in disasters are broad and powerful.

We do learn, however, and regardless of the interests and uses, the U.S. federal government has evolved institutions and organizations that cope to some degree with our infrequent but inevitable natural disasters.

EXPANSION OF FEDERAL RESPONSE

There was no official mandate for the federal government to respond to disasters through most of our history as a nation. It is really quite new. David Moss (1999) examined the history of federal disaster relief in terms of three phases of federal protective services. The first, in the nineteenth-century, was concerned with creating a secure environment for business and involved legislation dealing with such things as limited liability, property rights, bankruptcy, and deposit and crop insurance. The second, from 1900 to 1960, emphasized creating a secure environment for workers. This involved workers’ compensation, old-age insurance, unemployment insurance, and disability insurance. A regulatory system was gradually added covering occupational safety, health, pension regulation, and insurance regulation. From 1960 on, federal involvement increased substantially, largely as a result of increased prosperity and rising standards of living. Moss calls this “creating a secure environment for all citizens.” Product liability and federally insured mortgages had already appeared in the second period (and national defense and local poor laws were there from the beginning), but this third period saw a dramatic expansion of federal disaster relief, health, safety, environmental protection, federal insurance and financial guarantees, expanded welfare provisions, and new liability laws. (Moss 1999)

But, as Moss notes, “federal disaster policy represents an intricate patchwork of disparate programs and commitments.” (321) This was to be expected since, in contrast to European nations, we had a weak central government (three branches of government checking each other; substantial power to the individual states) that was adverse to both planning and a big role for the federal government. Unplanned, the additions were opportunistic and irreversible. Not only was the obvious constituency of public facilities such as schools included, but disaster spending soon extended to private businesses, given their influence, and even individuals in politically sensitive areas as well. For example, subsidized home loans for disaster victims rose from only eleven in 1953 to 195,762 by 1972, and could be very much larger today. In 1955 the federal government covered only 6.2 percent of total damages from Hurricane Diane; by 1972 it covered 48.3 percent of damages from Tropical Storm Agnes and has continued to cover roughly half of uninsured losses from major disasters since then. (327)

Moss attributes this to rising expectations of the citizens; they began to take federal disaster relief for granted. But this may just as well have been the consequences, rather than the cause, of increased funding. The cause may have been the power of business lobbies in Congress. Business and local governments saw that there was money to made from disasters, and lobbied, in the patchwork of disparate programs and special interests, to get taxpayers in all of society to cover the losses of the few. The losses of one area are “cross-subsidized,” or “socialized,” and paid for by everyone. (Wamsley and Schroeder 1996) This is only a sound policy if responsibilities come with the subsidization: insurance that one must take out and pay for, and strict standards that reduce the damage to buildings and limits their location in risky areas. That did not happen. Instead, disaster payments followed a political path.

Roughly fifty disasters a year have been declared since the 1990s. Thomas Garrett and Russell Sobel (2002) conducted a study of disaster declarations and the amount of funds allocated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (established in 1979). They found that the president’s decision to declare a disaster and the amount of funds allocated for the disasters were determined by the political interests of the president and of the twenty or so congressional committees that had oversight over FEMA. The presidents favored the states that were politically important for their election and re-election plans. States having congressional representation on FEMA oversight committees received a larger share of disaster expenditures, and in election years the association increased. Garrett and Sobel’s evidence was so strong that they could conclude: “Our models predict that nearly half of all disaster relief is motivated politically rather than by need.” (Garrett and Sobel 2002) Organizations provide bundles of resources to be used, and thus are tools. The outrage over politically motivated relief following Katrina was justified by its extent, but it was not new.

Comparatively little of the federal disaster funds from the 1960s to the present went to reducing basic vulnerabilities; instead, more and higher levees and better warning systems were the result. (Better escape routes for evacuations were also funded, and since this is a temporary reduction of the size of the human target, it addresses a basic vulnerability issue to some degree.) Most businesses and most homeowners did not take out federal insurance, even though it was heavily subsidized through taxes on the rest of the nation. Farmers without insurance, for example, qualified for aid almost as easily as those that bought insurance. A farmer could recoup as much as 90 percent of the value of his crops if the area was declared a disaster area. (Moss 1999, 331) The federal government, from time to time, attempted to put limits on the amount of relief, for example, denying soil-repair grants to anyone involved in three or more disasters over the previous twenty-five years, but Congress blocked the requirement. The failure of the government to credibly force business and citizens to take out insurance and change risky practices generated a “moral hazard” problem: “Citizens who feel confident that the government will pay are more likely to forgo insurance coverage and to live in more hazard-prone areas,” writes Moss. (335)

Thus, not until the 1950s was the federal government much involved in large natural disasters. The outrage over its failure in the case of Katrina is quite new; there was no substantial federal response to the decimation of Galveston, Texas, in 1900. That event took eight thousand lives, and there was no expectation of federal relief, let alone federal responsibility for failing to protect the citizens. We have come a long way, but there are inevitably many costs. On the positive side, federal involvement has meant raising construction standards and some regulation of land use in risky areas. But this “preemptive” role is quite secondary to the expenditure of vast sums of money on construction (dams, levees, channels) and on reconstruction, insurance payments, and direct aid. Where there is money, there will be political influence—favored states are more likely to be declared eligible for aid—and the opportunity for corruption; and since organizations are tools, they may be used for ideological ends, too (like rounding up dissidents, as we will see). Federal involvement is essential in a society that continues to generates new opportunities for large disasters as it concentrates its population in risky areas, concentrates hazardous materials, and concentrates private power in our critical infrastructure. Unfortunately, the kind of federal involvement we have had, as we will show in the case of FEMA, has done very little to reduce the concentrations that so endanger us.

BIRTH OF FEMA

It was in the 1960s and 1970s, with increased prosperity and a rising standard of living, that the impact of natural disasters became more apparent and burdensome. The weather had not changed, but the number of people and structures in the way of its most violent expression had. It was apparent that the federal government needed to play a stronger and more coordinating role. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had an agency for disaster assistance, but most of the effort was scattered among more than one hundred federal agencies. The cluster of major hurricanes in 1962, 1965, 1969, and 1972 were not that unusual, but they were now more damaging. Nor were the two big earthquakes in this period—the 1964 Alaskan earthquake and the San Fernando earthquake in Southern California in 1971. They all brought about increased legislation: the 1968 National Flood Insurance Act and the 1974 Disaster Relief Act enlarged the federal role.

But it was the National Governors Association in the late 1970s that prompted a major reorganization. We will meet several professional associations such as this in this book. They often (not always) take a more national and liberal view than most of their members. The professional staff search out issues of concern to their members and move them toward positions that will benefit the community of members, rather than individual members, even the most powerful. One of the major goals of the Governors Association was to decrease the number of federal agencies with which state and local governments were forced to work, in spite of some very cozy relations favored states had with the federal government. Coincidentally, though it may not have been that significant, President Jimmy Carter was nearing the end of a large-scale federal reorganization initiative. Partly in response to the association’s devastating report on the fragmentation and politicization of the federal response, an executive order from President Carter in 1979 merged many of the separate disaster-related responsibilities into the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It was heavy lifting. FEMA absorbed the Federal Insurance Administration, the National Fire Prevention and Control Administration, the National Weather Service Community Preparedness Program, the Federal Preparedness Agency of the General Services Administration, and the Federal Disaster Assistance Administration activities from HUD.

THE UMBRELLA AGENCY

But there was too much political opposition to creating a consolidated and integrated organization with statutory powers over the merged units, as the Governors’ Conference study envisioned. Congressional committees were not about to give up their power over the agencies that would be merged. Committees are where the power of Congress lies, and a committee with few agencies to oversee has less to do and thus less power. So, FEMA became an “umbrella agency,” hovering over dozens of programs that retained their identity and retained control of much of their budget. (The Department of Homeland Security, which incorporated FEMA in 2002 is much the same, adding another layer of committee control over the FEMA activities, as discussed below.) This had consequences. One was that the planned integration of programs did not occur. In theory, when a disaster struck, a “virtual” organization would be formed out of the disparate parts, but the integration was less than desired. It would have taken more commitment from the White House than President Carter provided to bring the warring agencies into line.

In addition to the problem of getting autonomous agencies and their congressional committees to cooperate—that is, give up autonomy, which is what cooperation means—there was another serious problem: the communication demands of disaster response. One of the rationales for a new agency was that it could install advanced data and communication systems for handling disasters. Even if the separate agencies desired to cooperate, their communication systems could not, just as the police and fire department’s separate systems could not communicate during the 9/11 tragedy. But the integrated communication effort never got off the ground, and the reason was quite unexpected, and it was the second fateful consequence of the umbrella agency format.

In a move that quickly diverted the agency from natural disaster relief, the notion of disasters was broadened to deal with “all hazards,” most notably including deliberate attacks from foreign powers, namely, a nuclear strike by the USSR or its satellites. Moreover, it would deal with the problem of foreign agents fomenting dissent using domestic radicals, and with public protests against, say, a U.S. invasion of war-torn Central America countries. Civil defense responsibilities were transferred to the new agency from the Defense Department’s Defense Civil Preparedness Agency. We will return to this move later, since its significance was considerable. But first, a quick look at the prosaic difficulties of delivering decent service when so many political interests must be served.

THE POLITICAL DUMPING GROUND

With the devastations of California’s Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 and Hurricane Andrew on the East Coast in 1992, major national attention turned toward FEMA. It had not been faring well. During the Reagan administration, which started just after the agency was formed by the Carter administration, it was damaged by scandal, organizational turmoil, and political conflict. The agency was seen as a “dumping ground” for the president’s political cronies (Waugh 2000, 29), just as the Department of Homeland Security was to be seen in 2003. This is one way organizations can be of use.

There were structural problems as well. Conceiving of itself not as the nation’s 911 responder but as the responder of last resort, after local and state agencies were overwhelmed and called it in, FEMA waited for North Carolina officials to ask for help during Hurricane Hugo, in 1989. But the emergency communication system in the state had broken down—the state officials in charge could not effectively communicate with local officials and could not get damage assessments to document their request for federal aid from FEMA. FEMA officials waited for the governor’s formal request, and the assistance was several days late. Rather than being reactive, FEMA should have been proactive, and have prompted state officials to ask for power generators and other equipment needed, and staged supplies close to the area. (Waugh 2000, 29) Three years later, with George H. W. Bush as president, it was still slow in responding to Hurricane Andrew, and while it did what it was supposed to do (waiting for requests rather than being proactive), the preparations were no match for the category four hurricane (category five is the worst). (The storm was initially predicted to hit Miami, which would have meant an incredible disaster; as it was, it was the nation’s worst to that date.) The account of political scientists Gary Wamsley and Aaron Schroeder is worth quoting at length. They wrote it before Katrina, but it appears that nothing has changed since 1992.

Things rapidly came unraveled. Neither the county nor the state emergency management systems were prepared for the destruction of a Class IV hurricane. Emergency management personnel, police and fire departments, power companies, and others who normally would have been the mainstays of disaster response were victims of Andrew themselves. No one was able to mount an effective assessment of the damage or of medical and life support needs. Officials in the state EOC at Tallahassee kept pleading with local officials to tell them what they needed, and frustrated and equally frantic local officials kept saying they did not know what they needed— “Send Everything!” To which agonized state officials could only reply, “We can’t send everything.”

Finally on the third day after the hurricane (and three days after a visit by President Bush and the Director of FEMA), the chaos, frustration, and lack of large-scale help from anywhere prompted Kate Hale, the Dade County Director of Emergency Preparedness, to hold a press conference. In exasperation, she uttered a politically explosive sound bite: “Where the hell is the cavalry on this one? We need food. We need water. We need people. For God’s sake, where are they?” (Wamsley and Schroeder 1996, quoting Newsweek, September 7, 1992, p. 23)

The response to this nationally televised cry of anguish was that FEMA, which had been responding “with what it considered better than average speed,” was bypassed by the White House and the next day 7,000 federal troops arrived in Florida, with more on the weekend, until almost 20,000 military personnel from all branches were there, including nineteen generals. In addition, the Secretary of Transportation was dispatched to take charge, and FEMA was pushed aside. The authors indicate that extensive interviews with disaster personnel suggested that the troops, in part, made things worse—after all 20,000 had to be transported, housed, and fed, causing congestion. It was the first major participation of federal troops in a hurricane disaster, and was controversial.

In an extensive research effort, Wamsley and Schroeder concluded that FEMA was cobbled together in 1978 by a rapidly declining presidential reorganization project under President Carter. It had never fully overcome the results of its many birth defects, they argued. It has been an agency torn by turf fights along program lines, overburdened with political appointees, stuck with a “Mr. Bumble” image, labeled the “federal turkey farm” for the quality of its appointees, tagged with a reputation for petty sleaze and tacky scandals, seen as trying to play a major role in national security without the necessary skill or clout, and perceived of by other agencies as claiming more power to coordinate the rest of the government than it had muscle or capability to do. (Wamsley and Schroeder 1996)

The details are convincing, illustrating the difficulties of overcoming our vulnerabilities through normal governmental processes, given the strength of congressional committees and the interests they represent, and the distracted attention of the White House toward natural disasters that are relatively rare and, when they occur, can be blamed on God.

Although FEMA was (and still is) relatively small (about 2,200 employees in 1996, when Wamsley and Schroeder were writing), it was forced to take more than thirty political appointees, typically with no disaster-related experience and thus unqualified for the posts, a number exceeded only by the highly politicized Office of Management and Budget. Nine of the these thirty are presidential appointments, requiring log-rolling with the Senate, which must confirm them; this involves six different Senate committees, each with its own program interests. It is small wonder, the researchers commented, that it has been accused of being a dumping ground for political appointees. (Wamsley and Schroeder 1996, 240) Disasters create employment for political supporters. About twenty committees in the House and Senate had legislative jurisdiction over the programs and appropriations of FEMA, and more than two-thirds of House and Senate committees could be involved with its activities. No single committee had comprehensive oversight over FEMA’s activities, just a myriad of committees and subcommittees with diverse and conflicting interests.

In a 1992 report on internal controls, FEMA formally recognized the problem of fragmented jurisdiction when the director commented:

FEMA’s programs are authorized and directed by a myriad of enabling legislation, appropriations acts, executive orders, and National Security Directives. In addition, congressional oversight and jurisdiction involves some 16 congressional committees and 23 subcommittees. As a result, FEMA’s mission is continually altered and shaped in a piecemeal fashion by diverse events, the influence of various constituencies, and differing congressional interests. For FEMA’s management, appropriate integration of these various authorities into a cohesive mission is difficult at best, especially given the fragmentation and dynamics of legislative policy. (Wamsley and Schroeder 1996, 241)

Stopping there, and looking at Katrina thirteen years later, we are tempted to say either that nothing has changed or that FEMA’s failure in Katrina was no worse. After all, a major point of this book is that we cannot expect much from our organizations. That is true, but there are circumstances where organizations exceed their expected, normal failure and others where they perform better than we might expect. Much of this variation depends on how they are used. As shown below, FEMA has been at both extremes. FEMA performed poorly in its first year, partly because it was new and partly because President Carter’s authority eroded severely with the extreme inflation and the Iran hostage situation that he faced. Its performance worsened under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush as it changed its focus and structure. Then, under President Clinton, it became a model agency and began to consider vulnerability reduction. Under the second President Bush, it has reverted to the low level of operation it had under President Reagan. It is an important story of how federal agencies can be used.

HIGHJACKING FEMA

The organizational problems of FEMA were only a part of the problem. While Congress and interest groups found ample uses for the agency, its political opportunities, and its money, ideological interests quickly found it to be rich ground for cultivation. It all started innocently enough. When the agency was formed, a civil defense effort was part of its mandate. The charter called for planning and training activities concerning “natural disasters, nuclear war, the possibility of enemy attack on U.S. territory, and incidents involving domestic civil unrest.” (Churchill and Wall 2002) FEMA’s first director, John Macy, emphasized the similarities between natural hazards preparedness and preparedness for a nuclear attack (now labeled the “all hazards” approach). During its brief history in the Carter administration, however, the civil defense program was clearly subordinate to the emergency relief program; it was just one other possible disaster it would deal with. The Cuban Missile Crisis was long past, and the world recognized our huge superiority in nuclear weapons. But the Carter presidency ended in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, and a year later natural disasters took a subordinate role to civil defense, even though natural disasters kept coming and there was no appreciable civil defense threat.

In his first year as president, Reagan extensively reorganized the federal government. Then he turned to FEMA in 1981, and appointed Louis Giuffrida, as its new head. Giuffrida had been a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army’s military police, and after retiring he joined the California National Guard as a general (and insisted on being called that). When he was governor of California, Reagan had chosen him to head up a civilian defense program. One of General Giuffrida’s significant initiatives in California was to establish a training camp for antiterrorists and to plan for the detention of large numbers of agitators and aliens. He brought this program into FEMA when he was appointed head of the agency, giving the civil defense program a new status. The agency set up the Civil Security Division and a training center for handling agitators and terrorists for more than one thousand civilian police. It also began gathering files on U.S. activists. The apparent intention was to round these up and place them in internment camps in the event of civil unrest. One national training exercise envisioned incarcerating 100,000 “national security threats.” (Churchill and Wall 2002; Reynolds 1990; Ward et al. 2000)

A top secret national security directive (NSDD 26) that Reagan issued in 1982 effectively linked FEMA with the military and the National Security Council (NSC). In FEMA, a small division, the National Preparedness Directorate (NPD), was charged with developing a classified computer and telecommunications network to ensure the continuity of the government in the event of a nuclear attack. The network was developed by the National Security Council and subsumed within the broader national defense information network of the Department of Defense (DOD). Though it was originated by FEMA, and drew on more and more of FEMA’s budget, the agency’s disaster relief personnel could not have access to it. It was “top secret”; only the DOD and the NSC could access it. Moreover, Congress could not examine the activities or budget of the civil defense part of FEMA. (Ward et al. 2000)

This proved to be a fortunate rabbit hole for our nuclear war defense system to hide in. Since the late 1960s, the public’s support for large civil defense programs had waned. The viability and effectiveness of the programs were questioned, and “Civil Defense, as a publicly funded program and profession, faced a bleak, and possibly short, future.” (Ward et al. 2000, 1022). Critics charged that the response to natural disasters took a back seat to bomb shelters in homes and mass evacuation plans, always a part of FEMA, though a small part in the past. (We now recognize these plans as ludicrous: see Lee Clarke’s [1999] riotous account of government plans in this period to evacuate the East Coast in the event of an attack and Ted Gup’s [1994] hilarious account of the foul-ups during drills for evacuating top federal officials to the Green-brier, West Virginia, and Camp David redoubts.) Now nuclear defense would be secretly revitalized in FEMA, and FEMA’s National Preparedness Directorate would expand substantially.

The result was that the original rationale for establishing FEMA —bringing together the many agencies involved in disasters in a communication network that would allow coordination—was defeated. The communication and data-gathering resources of NPD were state-of-the-art, but they could not be used by the rest of FEMA. In fact, the rest of FEMA could not even get assistance in setting up their own communications system from NPD and its DOD and NSC allies. They had to pursue their efforts on their own, and that meant many incompatible (and technically low-level) systems. “This lack of coordinated IT [information technology] development led to a situation where, by 1992, there were over 100 different IT systems operating within FEMA’s other divisions, the majority of which were incompatible in terms of network interfacing.” (Ward et al. 2000, 1022) Normally, we would severely criticize FEMA for this incompatibility; knowing that the employees in the field had no choice but to craft their own systems puts it in a different light.

FEMA’s NPD was also responsible for building three expensive, state-of-the-art relocation centers (should Washington DC be hit by nuclear weapons), a fleet of four Boeing 747s, and five ground mobile support and communication systems, with all these assets in constant communication. None could communicate with the rest of FEMA. “The result was that FEMA developed one of the most advanced network systems for disaster response in the world, yet none it was available for use in dealing with civilian natural disasters or emergency management.” (1023) (See also Churchill and Wall 2002; Reynolds 1990)

The NPD went further in stymieing the rest of the agency, and it was deliberate, not inadvertent. A General Accounting Office (GAO) report in the second year of the first Reagan administration, 1981, had faulted FEMA’s lack of IT resources and recommended computer models and networks for damage assessment, and the NPD division in FEMA responded that this was impossible because each disaster was different! Unbeknownst to the GAO and to Congress, it hired a company to develop just such a disaster assessment program. But when it was completed, it was shelved. “It was felt, by the officials [in NPD] that release of the software and recommendations would undercut the Continuity of Government program” that NPD was developing. This caused FEMA’s inspector general to question the priorities of NPD, which the agency ignored. (Ward et al. 2000, 1024) FEMA remained, throughout the 1980s, with a paper-based system, relying on the public telephone network, failings which showed up in 1989 with Hurricane Hugo, prompting U.S. Senator Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, from the devastated state of Florida, to declare that FEMA was “the sorriest bunch of bureaucratic jackasses I’ve ever known.” The next year, when disasters hit his state, Representative Norman Y. Mineta of California declared that FEMA “could screw up a two car parade.” (1024)

A report in mid-1992 from a congressional committee criticized FEMA’s lack of technological development and lack of support for emergency management, and its civil defense priority over natural disaster response, and labeled the agency a dumping ground for incompetent political appointees. (1025) Two months later, on August 24, Hurricane Andrew hit. With no support from NPD, FEMA had to purchase three hundred personal computers and commercial software locally, train its personnel in using computers (which had been in widespread use in business and government since the 1980s). But the system it set up was so primitive that operators had to take messages in writing and then key them into the computers later, leading to errors, lost reports, and delays in providing assistance. At the end of 1992, “it seemed likely that Congress would either abolish FEMA, or reassign the majority of its programs to other departments of the federal government.” (1025) This might have suited the cold warriors handsomely, since their directorate in FEMA could simply go intact to the National Security Council or DOD.

Others involved in the FEMA civil security operation included the controversial General Richard Secord, who was in charge of illegal arms sales to Iran to get the hostages freed, and the even more controversial Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. North was assigned to FEMA by former National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, who engineered the “guns for hostages” program wherein the U.S. diplomatic hostages, held by Iran after the Ayatollah Khomeini took over, were freed in exchange for weapons to be used by the contras in Central America. North served in FEMA from 1982 to 1984.

Eventually, the Justice Department concluded that FEMA’s activities were openly unconstitutional, and the FBI charged that the head of FEMA, General Giuffrida, had engaged in “de facto nepotism,” since he placed only his cronies in key positions in the agency, had improper relations with contractors, and that he had misspent taxpayer monies. This included spending $170,000 to furnish an opulent bachelor apartment in Maryland. (Churchill and Wall 2002; Reynolds 1990) General Giuffrida and his top aides were forced to resign in 1985 after investigations by a House committee, the Department of Justice, and a grand jury. (Giuffrida was apparently not disgraced because of this—he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Connecticut two years later.) But his departure did not deflect the new thrust of the organization. Organizations are useful. FEMA was the convenient site for the Far Right to mount attacks on the Left. (Or, if that is extreme, to place the threat of nuclear or terrorist attack higher than the threat of natural disasters.) However, these organizational uses can run afoul of the interests of other organizations, such as the FBI and the Justice Department. With their own security programs being jeopardized by the general, they made an issue of nepotism, graft, and embezzlement, something that would normally not exercise them unduly.

FEMA’S RESCUE

This diversion of an agency’s resources in pursuit of an ideological position about the “evil empire,” as Reagan labeled the USSR, illustrates the vulnerability of our disaster response system. It also illustrates the dangers of an easy blaming of the agency on the grounds of incompetence and being a dumping ground. Both charges are true, of course, but the explanation has deeper roots than administrative ineptness and corruption. All but one of the five divisions (directorates) of the agency were denied the resources to undertake its primary task of coordination of agencies involved; the assets were present in the civil defense division, but it was not interested in natural or industrial disasters. The issue is primarily political, not organizational. Congress had its teeth in FEMA for political reasons, but the biggest jaw was the White House.

Wallace Stickney, who headed FEMA during the George H. W. Bush administration, tried to free it up from dominance by the civil defense wing, but the wing was too strong (and possibly the president was too unconcerned). Stickney was blocked by the intelligence community, according to Gup’s account, which includes interviews with Stickney. (Gup 1994)

By the time President William Clinton succeeded President George H. W. Bush in 1992, the rationale for a heavy emphasis on the threat of a Soviet attack had long disappeared. In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union had collapsed and its military might was found to have been grossly exaggerated by the CIA. A significant Clinton initiative was the “reinventing government” program, headed up by Vice President Gore, and a keystone of that program was the “information superhighway,” encompassing information technology and networking among organizations. FEMA was an obvious candidate for reform. The GAO issued a report critical of the agency, and Congress asked for a study by the National Academy of Public Administration, which focused on the problem of political appointments. (Waugh 2000) In 1992 Clinton appointed James Lee Witt to reform FEMA, and just as important as this appointment, he made it a cabinet-level agency, reporting directly to the president. Just as Giuffrida had been a buddy of Ronald Reagan who shared his ideology when Reagan was governor of California, so was Witt an Arkansan friend of Bill Clinton when Clinton was governor. The difference was that Witt was a fourteen-year veteran of state emergency management—that is, experienced in FEMA’s original mandate. Furthermore, the threat of the evil empire had succumbed to the antiseptic of daylight, and the civil defense program that had hijacked FEMA was even less urgent.

Initially, Witt did not appear to be change-oriented. He opposed a reorganization bill based on recommendations of the National Academy of Public Administration. The bill died in committee. But by November of 1993 he proceeded to reorganize the agency along the lines of the defeated bill and most significantly tackled the information technology problem. The agency got good marks over the next run of disasters, including preparations for a hurricane that did not come ashore, severe Mississippi Valley floods, a California earthquake, floods in Texas and Georgia, and the Oklahoma City bombing.

Writing in 1995, Wamsley and Schroeder were reflective; could the difference be a good executive despite an unwieldy and ill-trained staff? They mused: “Perhaps it should be sobering to think about how much difference a good political executive with roughly 3,000 senior political executives of little skill and experience and an average tenure of two years can make?” (Wamsley and Schroeder 1996, 243) Witt’s exceptional skills included a sense not just of what an emergency agency should be about but of how to handle the political interests of Congress. There also were no disasters of the magnitude of Andrew or Katrina. But I am inclined also to suggest a more critical factor: the White House allowed the agency to have a coherent and legitimate focus and gave its head the authority and autonomy to pursue it. It backed up Witt in his tussles with Congress, for example. The White House can use its agencies for inappropriate or appropriate purposes, or can ignore them, in which case they will either go their own way (the “powerful bureaucracy” example, sometimes so powerful as to countermand White House orders) or be captured by the powerful interests in Congress (the “captive agency” example, such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as we shall see in chapter 5).

William Waugh, in his primer on emergency management (2000), shares the enthusiasm of administrative theorist Charles Wise (Wise and Nader 2002), and Wamsley and Schroeder, for Witt’s new leadership. FEMA was one of the biggest success stories of the Clinton administration, Waugh writes in his 2000 volume. Helped by a declining emphasis on civil defense as a result of the end of cold war, Witt emphasized mitigating the effects of natural disasters and more collaboration with state and local government and the private sector, according to Waugh (32) and others. We will mention some of these changes later, but the most important one, a brilliant and detailed account that we will draw upon by Robert Ward, Gary Wamsley, Aaron Schroeder, and David Robins, concerns information technology, or accessing the super secret information highway in FEMA, the National Security Agency, and DOD. (Ward et al. 2000) (For a fuller account of the episode that follows, see Schroeder, Wamsley and Ward [2001].)

TAKING IT BACK

Witt negotiated with the National Security Council and the Department of Defense and got portions of the information technology assets declassified so that FEMA could use them. These assets included the emergency mobile fleet, computer modeling of damage projections, and satellite surveillance feeds for area damage assessment, none of which FEMA had been able to use. The agreement also allowed FEMA to link up to the DOD “backbone,” the fast and secure major servers that carried its traffic. This allowed computers in the field to have satellite uplinks and downlinks for on-site assessments and real-time audio, video, and data feeds from ground locations. More advanced but classified systems remained under DOD control, and a series of agreements were established for use of these in emergencies, with the Army serving as the agency arranging support. All this helped enormously, but it was still cumbersome to get authorization, and the DOD backbone was unavailable to nonsecure systems at the state and local levels of government. FEMA needed its own network. With the National Preparedness Directorate being dismantled or at least defanged by Witt, its assets were placed in a new directorate, Information Technology Services (ITS) and charged with providing agency-wide services for routine operations and emergencies.

Even before the reorganization, while NPD ruled information technology, parts of FEMA were struggling to develop better tools. A Miami-based geographical information system (GIS) software company contacted FEMA shortly after Hurricane Andrew, and that software eventually provided the agency with a portable, ready-to-go database of information on populated areas vulnerable to natural disasters. Ground structures could be linked to individual addresses and homeowner information, allowing a direct match between structural damage assessments and homeowner assistance applications. Special vans could drive through an area, feeding visual information on damaged buildings into a database through satellite links, with two-way wireless modems sending voice, data, and graphics to field offices. Even before a disaster, since the system could be linked to the hurricane warning system, preliminary assessments of damage that might be sustained could be obtained and the necessary resources mobilized and prepositioned.

A test of a prototype before Hurricane Emily hit the Outer Banks of North Carolina in 1993 estimated the destruction of 674 homes, and the actual damage resulted in 683 claims. Furthermore, FEMA led the way in standardizing the GIS software for all federal offices that might use it. By 1995 the system was operational and extended to disasters such as floods, earthquakes, fires, and less frequent disasters. All that was lacking was a disaster-response telecommunications network outside the DOD network, which still required cumbersome access. The agency modified a system used by the U.S. Army to provide the nationwide capability that it needed. “The final system provided a ‘real-time’ environment with direct feed from the disaster area, and all levels of response sharing the same level of information for coordinating the response effort.” (Ward et al. 2000, 1028) It was, in many respects, the successful application of what was coming to be called “network-centric warfare,” but without the danger of highly centralized micromanagement that the military culture encourages. (Perrow 2004)

Ward and others wrote (perhaps unreasonably) glowingly about the success of this reorganization. Since major disasters involve virtually all of government, the FEMA IT system is linked to virtually all of government. “The system is capable of not only providing a real-time assessment of the disaster impact and magnitude, but also the location of food, supplies, and shelter necessary to sustain human life in the impact zone. Supporting the network are a series of databases and programs dealing with human services, infrastructure support, mitigation, and coordination of emergency disaster response, all available to any level necessary to bring the affected area back into social and physical equilibrium.” (1029) But it is unclear why the network failed to work in the Katrina hurricane.

Robert Ward, of Louisiana State University, says in a personal communication that despite the advances of the mid-1990s, the system was not completely integrated; many systems turned out not to be compatible with one another when actually put into action. More important, the system was based on the magnitude of disasters we had experienced. It worked quite well in the four hurricanes that hit Florida (itself unprecedented) in 2004. But it had never been scaled to deal with a response of the size needed in Katrina, and thus programming failures were compounded by a lack of processing capacity. In addition, the local telecommunications structure in the Katrina area was devastated and the volume of communications overwhelmed the system. (However, one would expect this to have been anticipated.) Backup generators ran out of fuel. The Mobile Emergency Response Systems (MERS) needed to provide the emergency link, and the portable field transmissions units needed to communicate with MERS, were initially pre-positioned in the wrong places, and so on.

However, enough data did get through to fully inform top FEMA, DHS, and White House personnel about the gravity of the situation. As we will see, those levels did not act appropriately on those data. While the system was not designed to handle the widespread devastation of Katrina and then Rita, it appears that the advances made under Witt were slowed when President George W. Bush took over. As we will see in the next chapter, the likes of Ollie North and Richard Secord have reemerged.

OTHER FEMA INITIATIVES

But before examining what happened to FEMA when it was moved into the new Department of Homeland Security, let us return to some of the other initiatives of the FEMA of the 1990s. They will bring us back to the basic issues of a federal response system: who gains, and who pays.

A major problem has been the credibility of federal threats not to help those who do not take out subsidized insurance or locate and build to federal standards. After the one-two punch of Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and the Northridge earthquake in early 1994, some changes were made. Since private insurers were pulling out of risky hurricane and earthquake areas, the demand for governmental-subsidized insurance mounted. First at the state level, then at the federal level, tougher laws and regulations appeared. At the federal level, incentives for flood-mitigation efforts and tighter enforcement of flood-insurance requirements appeared. The National Flood Insurance Reform Act of 1994 created a community rating system, giving points for specific mitigation efforts, to determine insurance rates for the community. (Waugh 2000, 173–74) Tighter enforcement meant that no federal disaster relief would be given to those in flood-prone areas that did not have insurance; lending institutions would be penalized for extending loans to borrowers without flood insurance; one could not take out insurance five days before the predicted crest hit, instead a thirty-day limit was required; supplemental disaster appropriations by Congress were made more difficult according to Moss. (1999, 339–41) Moss gives no indication of how successful enforcement of these regulations has been, but he admits, as we would anticipate, that the initiatives “are plagued by serious problems.” But it was at least a beginning. These measures not only provide better preparedness, they constitute mechanisms for deconcentrating populations in risky areas, something that we are prone to say cannot be done.

However, state governments want to have “healthy real estate markets,” and “there remains a serious question about the credibility of the federal government’s threat to withhold assistance from victims lacking federal insurance.” (342) A massive insurance organization has been proposed to aid the insurance industry with federal financial backing; unfortunately, if predictably, its rates and underwriting standards would be completely unregulated, opening the door to abuse. (343) But academic insurance experts are optimistic about what “an insurance system with rates based on risk” can do. The University of Pennsylvania insurance expert Howard Kunreuther advocates monetary incentives to reduce risk, fines for noncompliance, tax credits to encourage mitigation programs, enforced building codes and land-use regulation—all wise suggestions and needed. (Kunreuther 1998)

Moss recommends adapting key elements of the French system for handling catastrophic disasters, principally, open “cross-subsidization” of insurance through government guarantees. Unfortunately, this would mean that those who live in the less desirable but less risky areas (those far from rivers and ocean views, and far from Los Angeles and San Francisco with their earthquake hazards ) would pay, through taxes, the vast majority of costs for the insurance of those in the more desirable but risky areas. The argument is that since this already happens, the point of making it transparent is to make it easier for the federal government to then withhold relief from those who remain uninsured. At the least, those enjoying nice (though risky) areas would be forced to buy insurance, subsidized though it is. This would also reduce the insurance companies’ “enormous opportunities for gaming the system and cherry picking risks” that exists now. (Moss 1999, 347) As we will see throughout this volume, the absence of a strong regulatory state greatly increases our vulnerabilities, and does not “free up the market” to find the best solutions.

CONCLUSION

Relief from major disasters is clearly a federal responsibility, and the main agent from 1980 to the present has been the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But there are interests to be served in responding to large emergencies and in seeking to mitigate their effects through regulation. Starting at the top, the White House has election interests, which distort the response (President Clinton was no exception), and next in line is Congress with its powerful committees overseeing the multifaceted aspect of disasters. Political power makes the largess field unlevel. Then local building and real estate interests resist strong building codes and restrictions on the density of settlements in desirable areas, and local interests (farmers, homeowners, businesses) press for subsidized insurance or even for relief in spite of the failure to take out insurance. Basic vulnerabilities—dense settlements in high-risk areas, concentrations of hazardous substances in vulnerable areas, and so on—are rarely addressed because of political pressures.

With these constraints, it is not surprising that FEMA “could screw up a two car parade,” as one congressman had declared. But perhaps the most surprising thing is that with White House backing, an able administrator was able to turn the agency around, equip it with good technology for the time, and do his job despite the pressures just described. Even after it was moved to the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, when confronted with the unimaginable challenge of four major hurricanes striking Florida within weeks of each other, it seems to have performed well. However, the next chapter shows, its natural disaster response capabilities were losing budget support and experienced personnel, and lacking leadership from either the White House or the Department of Homeland Security which controlled it, it fell apart more completely than even during Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

FEMA is not responsible for addressing our issue of basic vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, no one is. The issue has not emerged, despite all the words spilled about Katrina and other natural disasters. Being basic, these vulnerabilities have a long time horizon and there is no natural constituency with electoral power that could publicize the dangers. But what if FEMA were given a mandate to deal with settlement density, escape routes, building codes, and concentrations of hazardous materials in vulnerable sites? We would need a change in our mindset to make basic vulnerabilities such as the size of cities in risky areas and the amounts of hazardous materials in urban areas as high a priority as rescue and relief. But if a government agency had such a mandate (and had White House support), a government agency might be able to do it. Governments have been successful at comparable missions; think of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration responding to the Depression, the mobilization of the country in World War II, the Social Security program, or the John F. Kennedy administration’s drive to put a man on the moon in ten short years, under budget. Is it unthinkable that one of our political parties would put making America safe by reducing its vulnerabilities as its main goal?