Something I've suspected for the past week is being confirmed by Knight-Ridder: FEMA's astoundingly poor response is directly connected to the Global War on Terror.
When FEMA was collapsed into the Department of Homeland Security, it was transformed from a relatively effective rescue and relief agency into an organisation designed to combat largely hypothetical terrorist threats.
Those who are attempting to absolve Bush need to pay close attention to this one: there's no way he isn't responsible for this one. The DHS was his baby, and far from protecting American citizens it is proving to be a somewhat harmful and dangerous paper tiger.
More below the fold.
First, from Knight-Ridder:
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, once a powerful independent agency focused solely on responding to earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters that occur on average about four times a month, was placed within the huge Department of Homeland Security after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The Department of Homeland Security sends $1.1 billion each year to states to combat terrorism, but just $180 million to help prepare for disasters such as Katrina. Much of the terrorism grant money is given under conditions that specifically exclude spending it on items or personnel that would be used in responding to hazards other than terrorism.
Since 1995, the federal government has declared 562 major disasters. All were natural disasters except two terrorist attacks: Oklahoma City in 1995 and the 9-11 attacks.
The hearings and investigations will likely show that the disaster response expertise of FEMA was badly eroded once it became part of the terrorism-fighting bureaucracy of Homeland Security, state officials and some former FEMA officials said.
http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/news/politics/12548188.htm
This is what the agency's own website says:
In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Joe M. Allbaugh as the director of FEMA. Within months, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11th focused the agency on issues of national preparedness and homeland security, and tested the agency in unprecedented ways. The agency coordinated its activities with the newly formed Office of Homeland Security, and FEMA's Office of National Preparedness was given responsibility for helping to ensure that the nation's first responders were trained and equipped to deal with weapons of mass destruction.
Billions of dollars of new funding were directed to FEMA to help communities face the threat of terrorism. Just a few years past its 20th anniversary, FEMA was actively directing its "all-hazards" approach to disasters toward homeland security issues. In March 2003, FEMA joined 22 other federal agencies, programs and offices in becoming the Department of Homeland Security. The new department, headed by Secretary Tom Ridge, brought a coordinated approach to national security from emergencies and disasters - both natural and man-made.
Knight-Ridder makes it clear - Americans are far, far more likely to come under threat from natural disasters than from terrorist attack. Yet, as FEMA itself admits it has become an auxiliary element of the DHS which has anti-terrorism as its primary mandate.
This is especially ironic as FEMA was originally created as an umbrella agency to prevent the kind of lack of coordination which can occur when several mandates overlap. Executive Order 12148, signed by Jimmy Carter in 1979, took an alphabet soup of disaster agencies and collapsed them under a single organisation with a clear mandate - to combat natural (and man-made, as needed) disasters. Given that natural disasters occur much, much more frequently than terrorist attacks, they rightly held the focus of the new agency.
This was a system that worked relatively well - until Mr. Bush decided to fiddle with it. The threat of terrorism - which Bush has exploited for much political gain - did not somehow make threats from natural disasters go away.
There was absolutely no logical reason to put FEMA under the DHS umbrella. For this, Bush is directly responsible. New Orleans is reaping the results of his shortsightedness and poor planning.