Lawmakers weigh cutting FEMA duties
Long-term efforts would be transferred
WASHINGTON -- Lawmakers and Bush administration officials are considering stripping the Federal Emergency Management Agency of its responsibility for long-term recovery efforts following a terrorist attack or natural disaster, the latest fallout from the agency's lackluster response to the Gulf Coast hurricanes of 2005.
Under a proposal by Senator Mary Landrieu, FEMA would still run the initial response to future catastrophes -- getting victims shelter, blankets, and food. But oversight of recovery efforts, which can go on for years, would become the responsibility of other federal agencies with expertise in specific areas: rebuilding housing, fixing roads, cleaning up hazardous spills, and supervising an area's economic revitalization.
"FEMA wasn't built to lead the recovery from a catastrophic disaster and it is a wholly inadequate tool for that kind of situation," said Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana. "FEMA should stabilize the situation -- i.e., establish shelters and get people into them. But at some point, say 50 to 90 days after the disaster, [the Department of Housing and Urban Development] should take over housing. Why? Because they do housing."
Landrieu, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Disaster Recovery Subcommittee, has been conducting a series of hearings about problems in the recovery efforts from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the twin storms that devastated the Gulf Coast and flooded New Orleans in 2005.
Based on what she learns during those hearings, Landrieu plans to craft legislation that would require FEMA to hand off its recovery efforts to specialists in the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Labor, Transportation, and others within a few months after a disaster. All the functions would be coordinated by what she described as a new "multi-agency long-term rebuilding authority."
The Bush administration has not formally asked Congress to make such a change. Neither a FEMA spokesman nor a press officer for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, would comment on such a high-level policy matter, although the latter did note that the core mission of DHS "is not long-term housing. We are engineered for all-hazards planning, protection, and response."
Informally, however, some Homeland Security officials say they welcome Landrieu's proposal. The department, still stinging from criticism of its flat-footed first response to the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, has been beset by headaches arising from the longer-term recovery effort.
Housing for Katrina and Rita survivors has been a recurring problem -- from victim complaints about battling FEMA red tape to rebuild their homes to major difficulties with the 145,000 trailers that FEMA bought for $2.7 billion after the storms. In a major embarrassment for the agency, news reports have surfaced that thousands of surplus trailers have sat unused on storage lots even though Gulf Coast storm victims are still in need.
The agency more recently has tried to sell the trailers at a significant loss to taxpayers, sparking another round of negative publicity.
"What FEMA does is [show] that it can spend an awful lot of money, and frankly waste an awful lot of money, without getting real long-term results," said Landrieu, whose state was hit hard by Hurricane Katrina. "This is not necessarily their fault. I'm not blaming them. But that's what it is."
FEMA stopped selling off the trailers last week after some were found to have been contaminated with unsafe levels of formaldehyde, making people sick. When top department officials discussed the formaldehyde problem at a daily morning meeting in late July, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told his staff that FEMA "has to get out of the trailer business," according to an official present in the conference room.
Some allies of the Bush administration have publicly applauded the idea of handing off FEMA's long-term recovery duties to other agencies. James Carafano, a homeland security specialist at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, urged Congress to extend Landrieu's proposal by removing FEMA from a disaster zone within weeks instead of months.
"There is all kind of expertise in the government on recovery issues," Carafano said. "It's redundant to have FEMA involved in it, and a distraction from their core mission."
But some skeptics doubt the proposal would make long-term disaster recovery more efficient. Drew Sachs, a crisis management and preparedness consultant who worked for FEMA from 1991 to 1999, said that such a handoff would be disruptive and confuse disaster victims, forcing them to navigate a new set of bureaucracies.
Sachs said that he agreed that specialists from other parts of the government should be more involved in disaster recovery efforts. But, he said, someone will still need to coordinate the effort -- a job FEMA already has experience doing. And regardless of who runs an emergency housing program, he warned, there will always be problems.
"Part of the reason I would bet that FEMA would like to get out of that [trailer] business is because it's very difficult," he said. "They get hit in the news all the time by it. There's always a story about the single mother who has a problem that's not being met. But that is going to be the nature of the beast no matter who manages it."
If Congress passes legislation to disperse FEMA's long-term recovery role among other departments, it will be something of a reversal from the agency's origins. President Jimmy Carter created FEMA in 1979 because he was concerned that the various federal agencies that helped local officials deal with disasters were too scattered and needed to be unified.
Originally, FEMA only handled short-term response issues. But after two unusually large disasters -- Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and the California earthquake in 1994 -- the agency evolved to oversee decade-long recovery and rebuilding efforts. The recovery from Katrina and Rita, an even bigger catastrophe, will probably take even longer.
"This is 'mission creep,' " said Carafano. "The fire department doesn't stay there and rebuild your house after a fire. They go back to the firehouse and get ready to put out the next fire. That is what FEMA should be doing." 