We have truly entered the bizarro world with this administration.
FEMA director faces his own storm of controversy
By Jill Lawrence, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — In his online résumé, Michael Brown touts his experience dealing with hurricanes and wildfires. He talks of being a state legislative committee director and an assistant city manager. He doesn’t mention the decade he spent as chief rules enforcer for the Arabian Horse Association.
The horse job, which he left in 2000, is now fodder for critics who say Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), has botched the Katrina relief operation. Those critics include Republicans, Democrats and newspapers.
President Bush appointed a FEMA director who had “absolutely no credentials” for the job, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Tuesday.
“The more one learns about him,” Republican commentator William Kristol said on Fox News Sunday, “one is surprised that he’s in that job in the first place.”
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, however, said FEMA had a disaster plan in place, but Louisiana leaders did not implement it. “Brown is getting a bad rap,” he said.
More not-so-bad news for Brown: Only 29% in a new USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll said that any top federal officials handling relief efforts should be fired. (Related story: Pentagon brass defends Katrina response)
Brown, 50, an Oklahoma native, was active in Republican politics and ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1988. He practiced law in Oklahoma and Colorado before taking the job with the horse association.
He came to the Bush administration through Joe Allbaugh, a college friend of Brown’s who was Bush’s chief of staff when he was Texas governor and his campaign manager in 2000.
Allbaugh became FEMA director in 2001, when Bush took office, and hired Brown as general counsel. Brown was promoted to deputy director and by 2003 had the top job, after Allbaugh left for the private sector.
Brown says he has led the federal government’s response to more than 160 disasters and emergencies. He assured the public last week that “the full force of the U.S. government” was being brought to bear in “an unprecedented response” to the disaster.
On national TV Thursday, Bush called him “Brownie” and said he was doing “a heck of a job.” Brown himself was all over TV, four networks on Friday morning alone.
But his appearances were contentious. He said people were “getting the help they need” and called New Orleans security “pretty darn good,” contradicting reports and video from the scene. He was forced to explain why, despite extensive TV coverage, he didn’t know that thousands of people were stranded without food or water at the New Orleans Convention Center.
“Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially,” the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper said Sunday in an “open letter” to Bush.
By then, Brown had vanished from sight, and his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, had become the face of the federal response. Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said Brown briefs the media but otherwise is focused on his mission: “aiding those in need and getting about the reconstruction and rebuilding process.”
Bush and other leaders were non-committal Tuesday about Brown’s future. Asked if he was going to fire anyone, Bush replied, “I’m going to find out over time what went right and what went wrong.”
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., told NBC “it’s too early to judge” whether Brown should go. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said “there needs to be some accountability” for the federal failures, but “where it starts and who it should be, I will expect the administration to handle.”
Havidán Rodríguez, director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware, said FEMA lost autonomy, money, focus and direct access to the president when it was folded into the mammoth new Department of Homeland Security in 2003. “These are issues that go well beyond one person,” he said.
Clinton introduced a bill Tuesday that would separate FEMA from Homeland Security. It would also require FEMA directors to have emergency- management experience.