No Experience Necessary, Part III

FEMA Director Michael Brown, who was relieved of day-to-day responsibility for Katrina relief efforts in the Gulf is not gone and not forgotten. Knight Ridder newspapers is reporting that Brown is "the boy for what's gone wrong with an agency once lauded for its lightning reflexes. The nation's federal disaster agency has been politicized and dismantled over the past four years and Brown is a symptom of that transformation, said disaster and government-efficiency experts.

"The Bush administration has filled FEMA's top jobs with political patronage appointees with no emergency-management experience, cut disaster-preparedness budgets and marginalized the agency by merging it with the new anti-terrorism bureaucracy, according to those experts, which include four former senior FEMA officials. The number of career disaster-management professionals in senior FEMA jobs has been cut by more than 50 percent since 2000, federal personnel records show.....

New York University Public Service professor Paul C. Light....[said] 'The real problem here is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with the appointments process. It's the people who decided to put him in place and put all those politicals in place.'

George Haddow, a former FEMA deputy chief of staff under President Clinton and the co-author of an emergency-management textbook, called what happened in the last four years the 'deconstruction of the most robust emergency management and effective response system in the world.'"