Former FEMA director says agency was gutted
By Chris Strohm
cstrohm@govexec.com
The former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency told Congress Tuesday that the agency was beleaguered and beaten up by budget cuts and personnel losses during the past three years, and overwhelmed by the events of Hurricane Katrina.
Michael Brown resigned as FEMA's director on Sept. 12 under intense pressure from lawmakers and the public in the aftermath of the emergency response to the hurricane. The embattled Brown -- who still is on contract as a consultant to DHS and is being paid his full salary of $148,000 - testified Tuesday before a special House committee investigating the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina.
Brown said FEMA's budget and personnel have been decimated since he took over the agency in January 2003. He said his budget requests never made it past the Homeland Security Department, which meant Congress never saw them. He said, for example, that the agency did not receive the necessary funding to implement lessons learned from an exercise last year called Hurricane Pam, which predicted flooding in New Orleans and massive communications and coordination problems among local, state and federal officials.
He said he wrote letters to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and former secretary Tom Ridge about the problems, but the agency still had budget cuts each year and lost critical personnel. FEMA, he said, lost out in priority battles when it came to the war on terrorism, the creation of DHS and the second-stage review of the department done by Chertoff earlier this year.
"I have predicted privately for several years that we would reach this point because of a lack of resources and a lack of attention being paid to what was ... a very robust organization," Brown said. It was extremely difficult to "keep that place together," he said, and added he probably should have resigned earlier so he could have made public the problems he was experiencing.
(article continues)
Facebook
Twitter