Centerfield

I am not defending Brown, but I think this is at least partly plausible. DHS is a consolidation of like minded agencies whose functions related to "protecting the homeland." When you consolidate any organization, a common unintended consequence is the loss of talent, decision making, etc., etc. Furthermore, it is common that the leadership of the new consolidated organization has little to no experience completing organizational objectives, and although their policies and ideas are well thought out, they aren't always realistic. It has been my impression, and it it just that, that Tom Ridge never managed the stand up of DHS appropriately, and the readiness of organizations like FEMA were negatively affected. In retrospect, I wonder why creating another government cabinet level department was ever a wise move after September 11th. That horrible day, in my estimation, was due to an intelligence break down, not failure by the homeland security community. In fact, I believe Joe Allbaugh and FEMA were recognized for playing a competent emergency management roll after the terrorist attacks. We cannot say the same about Mike Brown's FEMA and Katrina, obviously. Now we have a new layer of bureacracy that more than likely will never go away.

Posted by: Mathew at February 10, 2006 12:01 PM

"Sit down, and write two letters".
Funny!!!

Posted by: Bob J Young at February 10, 2006 12:48 PM

Oh, I don't think it's implausible. My point is only that all that's missing here is a "play ball" style declaration to "let the @ss-covering festival begin!"

Here's the thing: government inquiries into agency failures make sense only if we can learn something and do better next time. But they always seem, at least to me, to be conducted as though the top priority is to pin the blame on some (other) fall guy. What I'd love to see in such situations is for someone like the President to keep repeating the "ultimately it's my fault because it happened on my watch" card as the vehicle for getting people to focus on the "do better next time part" instead of the identification of scapegoats. Partisan politics makes this hard to do.

Now granted, identifying that the DHS culture negatively impacted FEMA (if it did) is worthwhile to find out. But how long will it take for some partisan to play the "this shows Bush is a moron for creating DHS" card? It's probably already been played across the blogosphere.

Hopefully our leaders will project an openness to problem solving instead of partisan attacking and defensiveness. Because that's the only productive way to approach it. I don't believe that, say, changing the people in charge to the other party's hacks will fix anything. If that happens, the @ss-covering songs will remain the same. What will help is a better outlining of authority, priorities, chain of command, and emergency processes. And for the most part, I believe that involves HOW, not WHO.

Posted by: bk at February 10, 2006 01:21 PM

Sorry, can't resist but how does a guy who's previous experience was running a horse association know ANYTHING about the "science" of preparing for a disaster.

Still doing a heckavu job Brownie!

Posted by: c3 at February 10, 2006 01:55 PM

And for the most part, I believe that involves HOW, not WHO.

Yup, exactly... It is not one's experience that matters, but one's ability to think clearly and make sound decisisions in crisis, and the people or processes around him or her. Brown had neither the latter, the ability, or the former, the people and process.

Posted by: Mathew at February 10, 2006 02:07 PM

Not really my point Matt. I think experience can be invaluable, and that some people can do better jobs than others. My point is that you don't fix a crap in, crap out bureacracy by replacing the parts, you fix it by improving the design.

Seems to me that for agencies such as FEMA, time is one of the most crucial factors, so the design should be lean enough to maximize responsiveness, and that means giving individuals authority to act quickly, and then not crucifying them when quick decisions made in tough spots don't work out perfectly.

Posted by: bk at February 10, 2006 03:53 PM

Sorry, can't resist but how does a guy who's previous experience was running a horse association know ANYTHING about the "science" of preparing for a disaster.

Still doing a heckavu job Brownie!

funny, you weren't so upset over Brownie when had to take care of hurricanes and fires pre-katrina.
And I have to agree with bk. I think Brown is covering his @$$ and once again the Democratic state and local governments will walk away "innocent."
- signed a liberal indpendent survivor of Hurrican e Isabel
ps - Brown was suggested by W., but approved of by 2 Reps and 2 Dems. One of them was Lieberman

Posted by: Rachel at February 10, 2006 05:41 PM

I was watching the newshour last night,they did a segment about the Katrina hearings.
Certainly a lot of finger pointing going on. Seems like DHS is pretty much just a giant pork fest. When it came time to preform, only the Coast guard and National Weather service had their act together. I'd heard similar stuff threw back channels. Millions of dollar of monitoring equipment was purchased by people who had no idea what they were buying. Then it had to be dumped because it was useless.

One thing is for sure, talk of doing away with the National Weather Service is over.

Posted by: Bob J Young at February 10, 2006 07:23 PM

Oops! That was supposed to be "tonight" not "last night".

Posted by: Bob J Young at February 10, 2006 07:25 PM

funny, you weren't so upset over Brownie when had to take care of hurricanes and fires pre-katrina.

Rachel; I was neither defending nor objecting to Brown pre-Katrina. I was struck by a non-scientist covering his ass by claiming his boss didn't know the science.

Personally, I think the biggest issue in the Katrina mess is the expected outcome of creating the Department of Homeland Security. We knew it would have significant logistical problem as it developed. Unfortunately, we learned those lessons with a catastrophic hurricane.

Posted by: c3 at February 10, 2006 07:31 PM

Bob hit upon the big flaw in the DHS structure when he said "pork fest." DHS and its components such as FEMA are largely dependent upon the quality of local response, and the funding mechanisms are geared to shoving the funding and planning decisions down to the local levels. First Responders principle. Any planning NOT based on First Responders is a recipe for total failure, because FR's are on the spot and it can take days to move in anything from outside in the best of times. The bigger the disaster, the tougher to do much worthwhile from a distance.

That's great if your local structure is competent. In fact, if your local structure is competent that's exactly what you want to do! But if your local structure is incompetent or corrupt, you're throwing money away to accomplish absolutely nothing but pocket-lining and toy-buying. No matter how good the line personnel, the local planning and coordination must be competent and prepared, or the front-liners are on their own.

I saw this up close from my end during Katrina, and during other (local) emergency activations since the DHS formation. We have a "clean" and competent and coordinated local First Responder network with lots of disaster experience, and did well before the changeover. All the state or DHS components such as FEMA have to do is plug into the local net, and it's all set up so that we can go 72 hours with no state response and a week without the feds. Anything that isn't contained and under control in that amount of time NEEDS massive "next level" support. IOW, the form follows the function.

But in Louisiana/NOLA during Katrina, the system took the "max hit" for design--and the local structure wasn't even close to prepared. They'd soaked up the money and pissed it away, and the "planning" was a joke. Conferences to decide how to use the things they didn't have because the money got siphoned away, or wasted on porkfest contracts or toy-buying without the required training.

Which leaves the same problem. How do you set up a "takeover" mechanism for federal response for when local/state response fails or is simply overwhelmed by scope and scale, all without encouraging the local/state structure to play the disaster funding lottery, depending on the feds to bail them out?

The system fails if the locals are not competent or prepared--there's no "linkage" for the feds to hook into. But any decent response MUST depend on the local First Responders, or you're building in 48-96 hours of no response at all. And if you set up a federal rapid-response unit (which seems clearly called for) you run head-on into the problems of Posse Comitatus and jurisdictional politics and local/state abdication of keeping their FR networks prepared and trained and equipped for those larger disasters.

Any ideal federal rapid-response would have to be backboned onto the military command & control systems. Even then you still have 12-36 hour deployment delay for the unexpected disasters. Tornadoes and earthquakes don't give you a week to start gearing up for contingencies.

Posted by: Tully at February 11, 2006 11:28 AM

Funny story:
Homeland security has one of the largest databases of radiation spectra from Kitty litter. The ingredients tend to be naturally radioactive. It kept setting off their radiation monitors. So they had to get new equipment that could tell the difference between kitty litter and a nuclear weapon. Bad Kitty!!!!!

Posted by: Bob J Young at February 11, 2006 05:37 PM

C3
please forgive my snippiness in my first comment, and I also agree that this was the first example of post 9/11 federal action in the DHS. And it did not go well. But I also did not see concerns over the organization of the DHS in general until Hurricane Katrina, especially that of FEMA.
What information I did find was post 9/11, archived in some USA Today articles about Hurricanes in Florida. Also, FEMA recieved a complementary letter by Democratic senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland. Whether this is a typical gesture I don't know. But I guessed that if FEMA stunk, certainly a Dem. Representative would not give it credit.

Posted by: Rachel at February 12, 2006 09:32 AM

oops...i mean post hurricane katrina (I should have used the preview button ;)

Posted by: Rachel at February 12, 2006 09:34 AM

You've got a guy who failed at managing a horse association, who was appointed head of a disaster agency. The fact that he has a Bush nickname (Brownie), implies good old boy network. Also supporting this is how he could go around Chertoff and just call the ranch at crawford.

From the testimony the last couple of days it seems that everyone from the president on down knew what was happening. The just lacked the imagination to comprehend the information. The little people in an agency can correct for much of the mismanagement of their supervisors, but at certain point higher headquarters needs to act or all is lost.

I've run into this with my own bureaucrats . You say this is going to be a disaster, and they just politely pat you and the head and move on. Meanwhile your jaw drops open and you think, “What part of disaster did he miss?” But there is nothing you can do, no higher management authorization means total inaction. Then when the event occurs they end up like a deer in a headlight, still incapable of understanding what's occurring around them.

There just seems to be a culture of , “Hey, New Orleans is doomed, but I broke 100 on my golf game. Boy that new putter is sweet.” If you lack empathy, understanding and imagination you can't deal with new situations.

Posted by: Bob J Young at February 12, 2006 11:13 AM

Remember how I said the National Weather Service's Katrina performance guaranteed their continued existence. Well, never mind. When they try to cut your work force by about 21%, somebody has you in the cross hairs.

Posted by: Bob J Young at February 12, 2006 11:41 AM

From the testimony the last couple of days it seems that everyone from the president on down knew what was happening. The just lacked the imagination to comprehend the information. The little people in an agency can correct for much of the mismanagement of their supervisors, but at certain point higher headquarters needs to act or all is lost.

This is a really good point, Bob, but I would also add that sometimes this problem flows in the opposite direction.

From my experience, at Coalition headquarters in Afghanistan, we did these comprehensive weekly briefings to the "decision-makers" (the Commanding General and Deputy Commanding General, the US Ambassador, and the CIA chief of mission, plus whatever roving Washington bureaucrat happened to be working out of Kabul at the time). Every staff section briefed their functional area-- personnel, intelligence, operations, logistics, plans, command and control, engineers, finance, civil-military operations, information operations and public affairs, etc. etc.

And without fail, every week, the various staff primaries would stand up and brief reams and reams of data-- numbers and buzzwords, spreadsheets and flow charts-- but it was all just raw data. There was rarely any analysis, which meant that the decision-makers had to do their own intutive analysis, and then try to compile it all into a comprehensive assessment of how things were going. It was overwhelming to say the least, and you could see it in repeated comments like "So what does all this mean?" or "What is all this telling me?"

The analysis should have been done by the staff primaries, thereby allowing the decision-makers to weave together processed information from which to make their assessment. And eventually it was (when we had a formal Effects Assessment Branch to force the function), but in those early days, I can't tell you how much harder it was for the bosses to make decisions because an effective information analysis process didn't exist.

Posted by: Bobby at February 12, 2006 12:48 PM

So...

How do you set up a "takeover" mechanism for federal response for when local/state response fails or is simply overwhelmed by scope and scale, all without encouraging the local/state structure to play the disaster funding lottery, depending on the feds to bail them out?

And, to add, while facing the inevitable problems of the locals being incompetent at (or unwilling to follow) the required legal forms for authorizing federal actions that override state/local sovereignty?

It's always fun to blamestorm. Figuring out workable solutions is a bit more difficult.

Posted by: Tully at February 12, 2006 01:35 PM

True.
Its good to give people the raw data and graphs that back up your recommendation, but you also have to give the recommendations. It's strange they just threw numbers at the "decision-makers" . Some other dynamic had to be going on behind the scenes. Like they were told not to inject their “speculation”, or were afraid to speak up. Nothing happen in a vacuum.

Posted by: Bob J Young at February 12, 2006 01:35 PM

Tully:There are only so many ways to fix a system. I can only think of two, bottom up and top down. Either the people at the top understand the problems, and are committed to fixing them or the first responders take the power for themselves. Maybe with a national association that demands FEMA implement a list of recommendations.

As callus as this may sound, the only real solution I see is to have more disaster. Isn't it the classic difference between a peacetime army and a wartime army? After Gulf War 1 the DOD went around to every mission and said, “How much support did you give during the last action? None? Then your gone baby!” At least thats what they did to missions around me.

You know its kind of funny. This is the very topic of Jared Diamonds book “Collapse”. That is just so cool!

Posted by: Bob J Young at February 12, 2006 02:09 PM

There are only so many ways to fix a system. I can only think of two, bottom up and top down. Either the people at the top understand the problems, and are committed to fixing them or the first responders take the power for themselves.

But the actual problem is that tiered-control disconnect, Bob, and it's part of the structure. You can't have a seamless transition moving up between levels if the levels don't cooperate, and our political system simply does not allow the "cram-down" approach. First responders can only do what their local/state controlling political authorities allow. They can't "take the power for themselves." Short of deploying their own armed and autonomous force, they can't. (That would indeed bring an immediate federal response, but not the kind sought!) Billy Bob the county dispatcher can't call up the 82nd ABN, holler for support, and have it just happen. He can conceivably bypass his local political structure and call the governor and make demands--but it's up to the governor to make the decision or tell Billy Bob to take a hike.

Similarly with the top-down approach--the feds can't abrogate state authority and "invade" just because they feel like it. And with our tiered system there are things they can't do worth a damn anyway, things that are quite rightly strictly local. (Which is the whole principle of First Response.) The White House can't just call up the 82nd ABN and tell 'em to go kick out Billy Bob and take over local operations. Not without authorization from the governor, and maybe not without authorization from the local power structure. And if they did, the entire local structure would probably refuse to cooperate.

Even with state authorization, if you want the levels to work together you can't do it by force. They have to be willing to work together and coordinate, and have the systems for doing so rapidly in place, or the system remains fragmented and slow no matter how good the intentions of the parties.

The basic problem is design flaw inherent in the political power structure. It all works fine when it's done right. But if ANY of the three levels are not in synch with the other two, there's problems. And if all three levels are out of synch, it's catch-as-catch-can. The butt-kicker is that you can't correct the inherent flaw without changing the power structure.

Posted by: Tully at February 12, 2006 04:09 PM

When I said “or the first responders take the power for themselves. “ I didn't mean usurp governmental authority. I meant organize into a viable political entity and create a grass roots effort to lobby for reform. After Katrina, I'll bet the whole first responder community is tugging at the chain of reform.

I don't know how precarious their employment situation is. Would a reform movement get them fired?

I would think a professional association or annual convention would be a good place to start. Use a blog or newsletter to gather and exchange good ideas. Apply the power of the blogsphere to this problem. The squeaky wheel gets the oil. If you don't squeak loud enough nobody will pay attention.

I can't readily do that with my concerns about the federal bureaucrats. Heck, I'm just glad nobody pays attention to the stuff I post here. As long as Centerfield stays relatively small I'm not that concerned. If we became to famous I'd have to shut up.

Posted by: Bob J Young at February 12, 2006 05:23 PM