First Things First

Wrong Priorities?

By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Updated: 6:09 p.m. ET Sept. 7, 2005

In the weeks before Hurricane Katrina, state emergency-planning directors repeatedly warned that the Bush administration’s post-September 11 focus on terrorism was seriously undercutting the federal government’s ability to respond to catastrophic hurricanes and other natural disasters.

In a tough letter to Congress last July and in a private meeting with top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials on Aug. 21, a group of state emergency-planning directors complained that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s traditional role of preparing for natural disasters “has been forgotten” under a DHS almost entirely devoted to the terror threat.

Not only did the Bush administration slash funding for natural-disaster planning this year, the state directors charged, Homeland Security—acting under a directive signed by the president—has geared almost all planning exercises with the states to responding to hypothetical terror attacks such as radioactive “dirty bombs” or anthrax attacks rather than far more common, and costly, disasters such as hurricanes, tornados and floods.

Internal Homeland Security documents obtained by NEWSWEEK lend support to the state directors’ complaints. Out of 15 “all hazards” disaster-planning scenarios approved by DHS and the White House Homeland Security Council last May, only three involved natural disasters, one document shows.

“I’ve been beating this drum for the past two years,” Bruce Baughman, director of the Alabama’s Emergency Management Agency and a former top FEMA official, told NEWSWEEK. “What I’ve seen happening is a total de-emphasis on natural disaster planning.”

The warnings by Baughman, the new president of the National Emergency Management Association, and other state emergency-planning directors are likely to become a focus of investigations now being planned by Congress into the administration’s botched response to the Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans.

They also have fueled a push in Congress to undo at least part of the major federal government overhaul that created the Department of Homeland Security in the first place. Democratic Rep. John Dingell of Michigan said this week he was introducing legislation to take FEMA out of DHS and restore it as an independent agency whose director would have direct access to the president.

Once it was thrown into DHS, under the massive governmentwide reorganization proposed by President Bush in 2002, FEMA got swallowed up by a “monster bureaucracy” and lost clout, Dingell said. Moreover, DHS’s new secretary, Michael Chertoff, was chosen primarily because of his credentials as a terrorist fighter—not his ability to respond to natural disasters, Dingell added. A federal appellate-court judge prior to being chosen by President Bush, Chertoff had been assistant chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division at the time of the September 11 attacks. “All Chertoff wants to do is chase terrorists and repeal parts of the Constitution,” Dingell told NEWSWEEK.

For his part, Baughman noted that FEMA’s two directors under Bush—Joe Allbaugh, who had previously served as the president’s 2000 campaign manager, and current director Michael Brown, a childhood friend of Allbaugh who had previously served as a commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association—also have had no experience in planning for and responding to natural disasters.

“To me, this is like putting somebody in charge of the Justice Department that has no legal background or putting somebody in charge of the FBI with no law-enforcement background,” said Baughman, who had previously served as director of FEMA’s Office of Natural Preparedness until he resigned two years ago.

Asked about the criticism from the state directors, Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke responded that in the aftermath of Katrina "a lot of people are wanting to play the blame game." But this was not the time to point fingers and assess blame while response and recovery operations in the disaster area are still continuing, he said. Knocke also said that concerns raised by state emergency officials about the lack of planning for natural disasters have already been incorporated in Homeland Security plans and procedures.

The concerns about the direction of FEMA have been building for some time, according to Trina Sheets, executive director of the National Emergency Planning Association, a group that represents state emergency planners. Some of it revolves around funding. While grants to states and local governments for counterterrorism emergency planning have soared to more than $1.1 billion a year, funding under FEMA’s Emergency Management Performance Grant (EMPG) program—which is specifically for natural disasters—was cut back $10 million by the White House this year to only $170 million, she noted.

Baughman said the disparities for Alabama are especially sharp. In his state, between $30 million to $40 million in federal funds are available to plan and train for hypothetical terror attacks while only $1.8 million is available for natural disasters. Although Alabama hasn’t suffered any terror attacks in recent years, it has had 24 natural-disaster declarations over the past decade, including three in the last year or so, Baughman said.

The internal FEMA documents underscore the point even further. Even before Homeland Security officials published their set of theoretical disaster scenarios last spring—which involved planning for such calamities as an “aerosol anthrax” attack and the unleashing of a “10-Kiloton Improved Nuclear Device”—an earlier February 2004 “National All-Hazards Exercise Schedule” prepared by Homeland Security showed the same imbalance. The schedule, marked “for Official Use Only,” included planning for more than 100 disaster scenarios, almost all of them terror incidents. In fact, only seven involved natural disasters—two earthquakes and four hurricanes, although two of the hurricanes were described as incidents in which relief and recovery efforts would be practiced “in context of a credible WMD threat during a natural disaster.”

The dissatisfaction among state planning directors was raised even more this summer when Chertoff proposed a reorganization of DHS that would take the Office of Preparedness out of FEMA and set it up as a special Directorate for Preparedness within the department. In a July 27 letter to Congress, the state directors noted that there had already been 25 major disaster declarations in 2005 alone, including ones for flooding, severe storms, hurricanes, tropical cyclones and landslides. Chertoff’s reorganization plan “totally neglects natural hazards preparedness and, if implemented, will have an extremely negative impact on the people of this nation,” stated the letter, signed by David Lieberbach, the director of Alaska’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, and Baughman’s predecessor as president of the state directors’ group.

The complaints finally led to a meeting in Washington on Aug. 21—just days before Katrina first started approaching the Gulf Coast—between a group of four state emergency planners, led by Baughman, and Michael Jackson, deputy secretary of Homeland Security, and FEMA Director Michael Brown. Baughman said he laid out the group’s concerns in some detail. While Jackson and Brown assured them that they understood their concerns and would address them, Baughman said he was not assuaged. “They were hell bent on going forward with [the reorganization],” he said. “They met with us as a courtesy.”

Doubtless Dons Brownie and Jackson expected something rather different from Baughman.