Get a room, you two!
Congress has run out of patience with the Department of Homeland Security on disaster response.
Two separate, far reaching votes in Congress last week served notice on the chaotically run Department of Homeland Security and its embattled chief Michael Chertoff that Capitol Hill is determined to impose radical reform.
But although Bush continues to trust him, Congress no longer does, even though it is still run by the president`s Republican Party. Last week, Congress voted to strip Chertoff of direct oversight of the troubled Federal Emergency Management Agency. Not only did FEMA perform disastrously in failing to respond adequately to the flooding of New Orleans and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, it also allowed scores of billions of dollars worth of bloated reconstruction contracts to be approved without adequate scrutiny and it paid out more than $1 billion in fraudulent insurance claims.
Last week the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee of the U.S. Senate served notice that it had had enough. It approved legislation to shake up FEMA from top to bottom and give it exclusive status within the DHS.
The new legislation…responds to the ‘serious failures in leadership and urgent need for broad reform’ of FEMA, [according to] Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine.
You can always tell when mid-term elections are coming. A little bit of integrity sneaks into Congress.
Didn’t lots and lots of people warn the Bush administration that it was a bad idea to put FEMA in there in the first place?
Man! the conservative learning curve is painful!
Hurry Bush, the spell is wearing off. You have to make another speech with the word “9/11” in it.
You can always tell when mid-term elections are coming. A little bit of integrity sneaks into Congress.
… and then quickly dies of neglect between election cycles.
Chertoff’s mother was an Israeli flight attendant when she gave birth to him in America, which made him a citizen of the USA. Because his mother was an Israeli, he is also a citizen of Israel unless he renounces it. That’s how you get an Israeli as our Secretary of Homeland Security.
It was Congress that created Homeland Security, gathered up all of the federal enforcement, security, and response agencies and placed them under one man that reports to the President. This was never Bush’s idea — although he sure didn’t put up much of a fight against it.
It doesn’t matter who is in charge of Homeland Security or FEMA; federal agencies are too unwieldy for anyone at the top to exert effective control. The best they can hope is that nothing bad happens on their watch.
Think about it: In the last twenty years, can you remember any agency head that received high praise for his or her response to a national crises?
It shouldn’t be a matter of trying to remember who did a good job as an agency head during a crisis – that should be transparent if they’re doing their job properly. It’s not the bloody NFL. What you don’t want are the scrubs heading up the grade-A botch ups.
#8) Fine, Anon. Then maybe you can come up with the name of the CIA, FBI, NSA, or FEMA head that wasn’t critized when his or her agency was in the middle of a national crises.
No defense from me on this one: Personally, I don’t understand why FEMA didn’t just become the Dept. of Security, instead of creating a new organization.
It would seem that preventing disasters, regarless of their cause, and recovering from disasters would be two missions that would both fit well with in one organization.
After all, it’s the same firefighers and police officers responding to both terrorists attacks and natural disasters…
“Think about it: In the last twenty years, can you remember any agency head that received high praise for his or her response to a national crises?”
Brownie, just before his ass was canned.
OP: You can always tell when mid-term elections are coming. A little bit of integrity sneaks into Congress.
Integrity? I had just the opposite thought. Now is when they trot out BS related to flag burning, gay marraige, social networking sites, video game violence and whatever else from the non-issue catagory they can find to pretend they are concerned about the important (read: not important) issues facing Americans.
The fact that they are addressing this issue is just a happy coincidence.
Nice one, Uncle Dave!
I lived through Hurricane Hugo, and although that was a power walk in an air conditioned shopping mall compared to the hell of Katrina, I still came away from the experience resenting the shit out of FEMA. I was out of power for about 16 days before FEMA got their office open in Charleston. I was lucky. Some people were out of a house for almost 16 days before they even got to apply for some sort of FEMA assistance. Everyone poo-pooed FEMA and their ability to do their job. A couple months later the earthquake during the World Series happened in CA. FEMA response time: less than 72 hours if I remember it correctly. The problem with FEMA in my view is that it gets complacent until the agency gets excoriated for poor performance by the press, public, and/or Congress. After getting reamed out for doing a bad job, they function properly for about 3 years, then back to the ho-hum usual. *sigh*
I’m agreeing with James Hill on this one. It shouldn’t matter the cause of the incident, the same reaction and people are involved.
I’m with James and Fusion on this one as well. I thought the intent was to coordinate response among agencies that are supposed to respond to events. Instead they created this huge money pit of incompatents that can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.
FEMA has always had a hit or miss record, but Witt seemed to have a handle on it, he certainly was good at PR, so that probably helped. For me thats a great compliment if you were a Clinton appointee…..
But, being Americans, we have everything *instant* now, so when an aid agency isn’t there yesterday we start bellowing and crying. The Federal goverment is way to big to act quickly anymore, this is why it’s critical that local and state goverments have a disaster plan and act on it properly, they can fill the gap until the big fed ball gets rolling. Katrina was a series of blunders, but in my opinion the most serious ones were committed by Mayor Nagin and Gov. Blanco. Brownie isn’t the only one who should have gotten sh*t canned over Katrina, those 2 should have been recalled, if you look at the record closely, you see both of them were almost directly the cause of many deaths and injuries with their gross negligence. Brownie just put the icing on the cake so to speak.
I disagree. A terrorist attack and a natural disaster are two different things. After a hurricane, you don’t have to search for too much evidence, or witness interviews.