Liberate FEMA from DHS, E.J. Dionne, SF Chronicle, 5/2/2006

[Coastie for Truth]

SO LET'S SEE: After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we created a Department of Homeland Security, known as DHS, which was supposed to make us safer.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which everyone refers to as FEMA, was folded into the spanking new department.

Then FEMA failed abysmally after Hurricane Katrina

<<<SNIP>>>

But if FEMA is such a bumbling bureaucracy, why did it work so well in the 1990s? It's perfectly clear from the appointments Clinton made that he took FEMA's work far more seriously than did President Bush. That explains the agency's decline better than any analysis of bureaucratic flow charts.

If there is a bureaucratic question here, should we ask whether creating a Department of Homeland Security and tossing FEMA inside it has made us safer? I've always wondered about the conventional wisdom that adding a Secretary of X or a Secretary of Y automatically gets problem X or problem Y taken more seriously.

Doesn't the logic of the story suggest moving back to a time when FEMA actually worked? Why not just liberate FEMA from DHS, as Sens. Trent Lott, Barbara Boxer, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rep. Tom Davis have suggested, and make sure that competent people run the place? An independent agency run responsibly beats innovative acronyms almost every time.