(FEMA Related) Storms Show A System Out Of Balance - Washington Post

[Coastie for Truth]

Four hurricanes had hit Florida in 2004, and the evidence was overwhelming that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had totally botched its response. Some of the hardest-hit counties, complained Florida lawmakers, were overlooked, while other counties out of harm's way had received lavish relief -- to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, much of it for damage that could not be documented.

Republican Reps. Katherine Harris and Mark Foley, along with other members of the Florida delegation, asked the two House committees with FEMA jurisdiction to hold hearings on what went wrong. "This, of course, is not just a Florida issue," the lawmakers wrote the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on March 3. "FEMA disaster assistance affects virtually every state."

The Florida debacle revealed serious deficiencies in FEMA operations and management, but when hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit six months later, the committees still had not acted on the delegation's request.

It was a typical response for a Congress that has had little appetite in recent years for executive branch oversight. And now, as lawmakers probe FEMA's mistakes in responding to Katrina, they are waking up to the consequences of neglect.

Government scholars and watchdog groups say the decline of congressional oversight in recent years has thrown out of kilter the system of checks and balances the Founding Fathers created to keep no one branch of government from becoming too powerful. Whether the Pentagon or the Environmental Protection Agency, if a department does not think Congress is paying attention, it could be more apt to waste money or allow problems to go unaddressed.

---Edited for brevity---


and :puke:

Professor Joel D. Aberbach, a political scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles (specializes in government accountability) is quoted as saying "There's a tendency to blame this on the bureaucracy, but this is the leadership of the Congress and the administration,..."

Senator is quoted as saying "If there was ever an agency in need of oversight, FEMA is it, ... It's a very big management job, and because of the nature of the work they do, they have only one chance to get it right."


Aberbach said that one problem in recent years is that political control in both chambers has been centralized within the leadership (DeLay? Hastert? Frist? Santorum?) , depleting the authorities of committees, and "You have to have realistic expectations of Congress -- it's a political body, ... ... But if you draw power away from the committees, you lose the expertise that they have, and that's certainly been a problem recently."

Norman J. Ornstein, a congressional expert at the American Enterprise Institute, has a harsher assessment. "This Congress doesn't see itself as an independent branch that might include criticizing an incumbent administration. Meaningful oversight, because it might imply criticism, has been pushed off the table altogether."



Collins called a hearing before her Senate panel in May on FEMA and the Florida hurricanes. Her star witness was Richard L. Skinner, acting inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, who had audited FEMA's Florida activities and found that abuses in Miami-Dade County were particularly egregious.

Skinner blamed "very serious systemic weaknesses," for nearly 12,600 Miami-Dade residents collecting more than $31 million in payments after Hurricane Frances, although the storm hit about 100 miles to the north. The money paid for homes and cars that were not damaged, and even for funerals, when Miami-Dade reported no storm-related deaths.

Testifying then for FEMA was ex-Director Michael ("Yer doin' a good job Brownie") Brown. He conceded problems in "very marginal cases" and called Skinner "just wrong" about other findings.

If my appends since Katrina hit seem to be obsessive about FEMA and "disaster response" - it is because I am a veteran of the United States Coast Guard, a Red Cross Volunteer, and a FEMA-Citizen Corps "CERT" and "RACES" volunteer -- and live in a high risk area.