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KATRINA AND THE POLITICS OF SECURITY
William D. Hartung, Senior Fellow, World Policy
Institute
Our hearts go out to the victims of Hurricane Katrina
and their friends and families. The greatest tragedy to come out of this
horrific event is the fact that many of the deaths were clearly preventable if
there had been a quicker, better organized response at the federal, state, and
local levels. As
In addition to donating time, money, food, and clothing to the survivors of the
hurricane, the most important thing we can do is figure out what went wrong and
demand of our political leadership that a fiasco of this nature never be
allowed to happen again. In doing so, we are not engaging in "the
blame game," as the White House has suggested; we are demanding
accountability, one of the basic foundations of a democratic society.
Politics and ideology played a key role in the Bush administration's shamefully
slow response to the hurricane and the subsequent flooding of
According to an analysis in the Washington Post (Susan Glasser
and Josh White, "Storm Exposed Disarray at the Top," September 4,
2005), funding for FEMA has been cut every year since it was incorporated into
the Department of Homeland Security, and "for the current fiscal year
funding for the core FEMA functions went down to $444 million from $664
million."
In addition to cuts in funding, the administration's mindset on how the federal
government should relate to states and localities contributed to the painfully
slow federal response to Katrina and its aftermath. As a New York Times
analysis put it (see Lipton et. al., above), "Federal Emergency Management
Agency officials expected the state and the city to direct their own efforts
and ask for help as needed." Would they take the same approach if
the levees in
CRONYISM KILLS: Unqualified Appointees at FEMA
FEMA director Michael D. Brown has since resigned, but the question of how he
got the job in the first place bears scrutiny. This was a man who was so
clueless during the crisis that he admitted to Paula Zahn
of CNN that he hadn't heard that the 20,000 people being "sheltered"
at the New Orleans Superdome had run out of food and water, well after this
fact had been widely broadcast on national television.
Brown was brought into FEMA in 2001 to serve as the agency's general counsel at
the behest of then director Joe Allbaugh, who had
been Brown's college roommate. Allbaugh himself was
picked based on politics, not competence. He served as the campaign manager for
the Bush 2000 presidential run. When Allbaugh left
the administration in March 2003 to become a lobbyist, he proposed that his old
friend Michael Brown take over his job as head of FEMA..
Among the lobbying entities Allbaugh created upon
leaving the administration was New Bridge Strategies, a company devoted to
helping
This brings us to the question of Brown's credentials. As the Washington Post
(Spencer S. Hsu and Susan B. Glasser,
Brown rose rapidly through FEMA, moving from general counsel when he was hired
in February 2001 to acting deputy director in September 2001, to a nomination
for deputy director in December 2001, to a nomination to run FEMA in 2003. At
no point in this process were his credentials carefully scrutinized. As noted
on the Time magazine web site (Daren Fonda and Rita Healy, "How Reliable
is Brown's Resume?," Brown and the White House
misstated his credentials when he was nominated to be deputy director of FEMA,
claiming that "from 1975 to 1978, Brown worked for the city of
This was the only position referenced on his bio that had any relationship to
disaster relief. Yet Claudia Deakins, the head of
public relations for the city of
So, the White House either failed to vet Michael Brown's resume, or they took
Joe Allbaugh's word for it, or they simply didn't
care. Unfortunately, Congress was no more diligent than the White House when it
came to checking Brown's claims. According to piece by Nancy Benac of the Associated Press that ran in the Washington
Post on September 7, 2005, at the 2002 hearings on Brown's elevation to deputy
director of FEMA, "Sen. Joe Lieberman, who led those hearings, called
Brown's long-ago stint as an assistant city manager in Edmond, Oklahoma a
'particularly useful experience' because he had responsibility for local
emergency services. According to an editorial in the Washington Post
(September 13, 2005), the hearings on Brown's appointment to be FEMA deputy
director took all of 42 minutes, and no hearings were held at all on his elevation
to director of the agency.
Joe Allbaugh and Michael Brown are not the only
patronage appointees to work at FEMA during the Bush administration. As Spencer
S. Hsu of the Washington Post ("Leaders Lacking Disaster Experience:
'Brain Drain' at Agency Cited", September 9, 2005) has noted, "Five
of eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials came to their posts
with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose
ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically."
Patrick J. Rhode, Brown's chief of staff, is a one-time TV reporter who worked
as a deputy director for advance work in the Bush 2000 campaign; Rhode's
deputy, Brooks D. Altshuler, also served as an
advance man in Bush's 2000 presidential run. In the mean time, veteran
officials such as the agency's top expert on hurricanes and the two officials
who directed the federal response to the
DISASTER PROFITEERING:
Will They Do for the
Funds to rebuild the areas of
Normal contracting rules have been suspended, so the majority - if not all - of
the contracts for hurricane relief and rebuilding will be awarded on a no-bid,
cost-plus basis. This is a recipe for fiscal disaster. As Danielle Brian of the
Project on Government Oversight has said, this process is likely to attract
greedy, self-interested companies: "This is very painful. You are likely
to see the equivalent of war profiteering - disaster profiteering."
Among the politically connected firms that have already received contracts
related to Hurricane Katrina cleanup and rebuilding include Vice President
Cheney's former company, Halliburton (to rebuild military facilities affected
by the storm and to help repair the breach in the levee); Bechtel, Fluor, CH2MHill, the Shaw Group, and Dewberry Technologies
to build or repair housing in the region; and the private military company, Blackwater Associates, allegedly to guard local buildings.
The majority of these firms have been active in the rebuilding of
Lobbyists have also hit the ground running in an effort to help their clients
secure contracts. Most prominent among them is Joe Allbaugh,
who flew to the region before many FEMA officials made their way there.
Among his clients are Halliburton and the Shaw Group, both of which have
rebuilding contracts already in hand.
A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH TO PROTECTING
A detailed explication of what needs to be done to
deal with the issues raised by Hurricane Katrina will require hard thinking by
citizens, the media, and government officials alike. We have two general points
to add to the ongoing discussion.
The first thing that must be done in the wake of Katrina is a re-definition of
what constitutes security. The federal government's role should be to
protect its citizens from deadly threats, wherever they emanate from:
terrorism, natural disaster, environmental degradation, HIV-AIDS, poverty, or
racism. In cases where anti-terrorism preparedness can also serve to protect
against other threats to public health and safety, that's fine. But in cases
where the requirements for dealing with a specific threat are unique, adequate
funding and competent people must be put to work on the problem.
The funding to underwrite a more comprehensive approach to security should come
from eliminating unnecessary military projects like the F-22 fighter and the
There is no such thing as total security, but we should at least adjust our
priorities so that the most pressing threats receive the attention they
deserve.
A second important step involves campaign finance and lobbying reform. As long
as
RESOURCES:
The following web sites have useful analyses of the implications of Hurricane
Katrina, and several have lists of places to donate funds to beyond the usual
suspects like the Red Cross:
Charlie Cray, "Guess Who's Cleaning Up," TomPaine.com, September 13,
2005,
available at http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050913/watch_whos_cleaning_up.php
Alternet
http://www.alternet.org/
The Nation Magazine
http://www.thenation.com/
Project on Government Oversight
http://www.pogo.org/
Taxpayers for Common Sense
http://www.taxpayer.net/
Halliburton Watch
http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/
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