**April 28, 2006 FEMA Emergency Management Higher Education Project
Activity Report**

\(1\) CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS:

Goldberg, Jonah. \"Radical Islam - Globalization For Losers.\" Jewish
World Review, April 28, 2006. Accessed at:
[[http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/jonah042806.asp]{.underline}](http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/jonah042806.asp)

\(2\) CLIMATE CHANGE:

Zeigler, Don. \"Global Warming: An Undeniably Real Weapon of Mass
Destruction.\" Bluefield Daily Telegraph, April 27, 2006. Accessed at:
[[http://www.bdtonline.com/columns/local_story_116174833.html]{.underline}](http://www.bdtonline.com/columns/local_story_116174833.html)

\(3\) COLLINS/LIEBERMAN SENATE REPORT ON FEMA \-- ADDITIONAL MATERIALS
AND COMMENTARY:

Am again noting this site in that since yesterday three additional
documents have been added to the \"Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still
Unprepared\" report section:

Introduction

Conclusions

Lieberman Additional Views

Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

\"Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared.\" Washington, DC: April
28, 2006. Accessed at:
[[http://hsgac.senate.gov/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Links.Katrina]{.underline}](http://hsgac.senate.gov/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Links.Katrina)

\[Note: Before reading this material I recommend going back and reading
the Collins and Lieberman statements delivered at the first Katrina
hearing (on the Committee\'s website), wherein the stage was set by then
for the primary recommendations to follow many months and hearings
later.\]

Commentary:

ABC World News Tonight (4/27, story 4, 2:20, Kerley) said the report
said the \"massive FEMA failures, the bungling bureaucracy during
Hurricane Katrina, can\'t be fixed,\" so FEMA \"should be dismantled.\"
But critics say their plan \"only amounts to reshuffling and renaming
the agency.\" In New Orleans, the President \"said the country is
already better prepared,\" and Homeland Security Secretary Michael
Chertoff was \"blunt.\" Chertoff: \"I don\'t have a lot time to fuss
about the naming issue.\"

Fox News Special Report (4/27, 6:06 p.m., Hume) reported, \"It has been
said that the job of the Federal Emergency Management Agency is to write
checks and take blame. Today FEMA was taking more than its usual share
of blame as a bipartisan congressional panel says it managed the
response to Hurricane Katrina so poorly it should be abolished
altogether.\"

Harrist, Ron. \"MEMA Chief: Don\'t Scrap FEMA, Fix It.\" Associated
Press, April 28, 2006. Accessed at:
<http://www.sunherald.com/mld/thesunherald/news/special_packages/renewal/long_beach/14448333.htm>

\[Excerpt: \"Butch Loper, emergency management chief for Jackson County,
said FEMA must be taken out from under Homeland Security and returned to
a Cabinet level position that reports directly to the president. \'As
far as I\'m concerned, the Department of Homeland Security is the
biggest black hole for taxpayers\' money the government has created,\'
Loper said. \'You can\'t combine terrorism and national disasters
because the two mindsets are so different. They are two opposite
animals\'.\"

Homeland Security Watch \-- \"Thoughts on the Senate\'s Katrina Report\"
\-- Accessed at:

<http://www.hlswatch.com/2006/04/27/thoughts-on-the-senates-katrina-report/>

\"I\'ve now read through the partial set of documents that were posted
online today as part of the Senate HSGAC\'s Katrina report (the full
report will be out next Tuesday).

Given the incomplete nature of today\'s documents, I\'m somewhat
reluctant to make final judgments about the report. But my initial
reaction is a sense of disappointment in the report. It focuses
significantly on bureaucratic issues related to the nation\'s
preparedness and response challenges, to the detriment of a
consideration of the systemic and cultural reasons for the multiple
failures in the response to Katrina. The House\'s report on Katrina,
released in February, takes much more of this latter approach, although
it lacked any recommendations that derived from these findings. Perhaps
the optimal analysis can be found in the synthesis of the two reports.

There are many good ideas in the Senate\'s report; for example, the
proposal to merge the HSOC, NRCC, and the IIMG into a new National
Operations Center. But for the most part, the ideas in the report are
necessary but not sufficient. Unaccompanied by transformative changes in
the cultural and systemic approaches to preparedness and response,
there\'s a risk that they could simply become org chart reshufflings,
and little more.

Take, for example, the headline proposal of the day: the abolishment of
FEMA and the creation of a new National Preparedness and Response
Authority (NPRA). This proposal basically amounts to turning back the
clock to the period of time between the creation of the Department of
Homeland Security in 2003 and the implementation of the DHS second-stage
review in 2005, when preparedness and response were (at least in theory)
merged into a single Emergency Preparedness and Response (EPR)
Directorate. The new proposal puts this neo-EPR directorate as a
standalone agency within DHS (like the Coast Guard and the Secret
Service), and creates a direct line of authority to the President during
a crisis, bypassing the DHS Secretary, but this still feels like the
same old FEMA in new packaging, and I don\'t think that it would address
the root causes of dysfunctionality in the preparedness and response
system, which have much more to do with the decision-making protocols,
chains of communication, and incentive structures at the individual
level than with the org chart du jour.

The most interesting document of the day is Sen. Lieberman\'s additional
views to the report, which provides a full record of the White House\'s
stonewalling and footdragging in responding to the Committee for this
report. Lieberman writes:

There are matters that we could not fully explore because of agency and
Administration recalcitrance and, in some cases, intransigence. We
don\'t know what we don\'t know - for example, as a result of the
Justice Department\'s failure to produce large volumes of what the
Committee had requested. But one thing we do know is that because we
were denied the opportunity to fully explore the role the White House
played in preparing for and responding to Katrina, we have little
insight into how the President and his staff monitored, managed and
directed the government\'s disaster preparedness in the post-9/11 world,
how they coordinated the rest of the federal bureaucracy in response to
Katrina, or how leadership was exercised by the only entity in the
federal government with the authority to order all the others to act.
Without this information, our investigation necessarily lacked the
ability to fully and fairly analyze and assess a critical element of the
response to Katrina.

Lieberman goes on in the report to provide a detailed account of this
recalcitrance, noting that when the White House did provide documents,
they were typically from publicly-available sources (e.g. the White
House\'s website) or other agencies; and, as has been previously
reported, accusing the White House of encouraging other agencies not to
respond to requests for information related to their interactions with
it.

This is shameful. As I wrote three months ago:

The American people deserve a full and complete answer to the question
of what happened during the response to Katrina - not as ammunition for
partisan games, but because if we don\'t find out the whole and complete
truth, we\'re going to be less prepared the next time we\'re hit,
whether it be by a hurricane or a dirty bomb. That fact should be
unacceptable to anyone who cares about national security and
preparedness.\"

Hsu, Spencer S. \"Congress, White House Divided Over Rebuilding FEMA.\"

Washington Post, April 28, 2006. Accessed at:
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/27/AR2006042701229.html?referrer=email&referrer=email>

\[Contains interesting quote from an unnamed House Republican who said
\"But they\'re \[Congressional leadership\] also aware that if
legislation to take FEMA out \[of DHS\] was sent to the floor tomorrow,
it would get 400 votes.\"\]

IAEM Listserve Excerpt (John Glenn, CRP): \"Obviously someone at the
Federal level doesn\'t understand preventive measures are less expensive
(lives and property) than reactive measures. Until that is understood
and implemented, Katrina-level disaster will repeat. There are things
which can and (I think) should be done at all levels to improve
preparedness - perhaps the Feds can apply a carrot-and-stick approach to
encouraging\" the states and municipalities to mitigate risks (building
codes, strict zoning, barrier reefs, other measures appropriate to the
risks). Did we forget every lesson learned from Andrew? Will we forget
the lessons of Katrina?\"

Kouri, Jim. \"FEMA Is Dysfunctional, So Let\'s Make It Bigger.\"
American Chronicle (Commentary), April 27, 2006. Accessed at:

[[http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=8766]{.underline}](http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=8766)

Krugman, Paul \-- In \"The Crony Fairy\" Says New Agency Would Not End

Cronyism. In his New York Times (4/28) column, Paul Krugman writes,

\"The U.S. government is being stalked by an invisible bandit, the Crony
Fairy, who visits key agencies by dead of night, snatches away qualified
people and replaces them with unqualified political appointees. There\'s
no way to catch or stop the Crony Fairy, so our only hope is to change
the agencies\' names. That way she might get confused, and leave our
government able to function. \... I guess it\'s impossible to select
qualified people to run FEMA; if you try, the Crony Fairy will spirit
them away and replace them with Michael Brown. But she might not know
her way to\" the National Preparedness and Response Agency.\"

Marino, Jonathan. \"Senators Aim To Kill FEMA, Add Disaster
Reservists.\"

Government Executive - Daily Briefing, April 27, 2006. Accessed at:

[[http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=33947&dcn=e_gvet]{.underline}](http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=33947&dcn=e_gvet)

\[Note: Quotes from a report I have not seen and would like to get my
hands on, if any reader has see it \-- one by Douglas Owens \"a veteran
disaster relief coordinator and civilian military employee\" who is
quoted as writing, based on his Katrina field experience: \"It soon
became painfully obvious that the \[disaster assistance employees
enlisted by FEMA\] we encountered lacked the fundamental training and
experience to be effective managers.\"\]

NBTV (Collier, FL). \"Local Emergency Directors Back FEMA.\" April 28,
2006. Accessed at:
[[http://www.nbc-2.com/articles/readarticle.asp?articleid=6845&z=3&p=]{.underline}](http://www.nbc-2.com/articles/readarticle.asp?articleid=6845&z=3&p=)

Neuman, Johanna. \"Divisions Arise on Whether FEMA Requires a Tear-Down

\- Bush Disagrees With Talk in Congress of Remaking the Agency, In or
Out of Homeland Security.\" Los Angeles Times, April 28, 2006. Accessed
at:

<http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-katrina28apr28,0,777547.story?coll=la-home-headlines>

\[Excerpt: \"Congress and the White House are headed toward a collision
over one of the big questions left unresolved in the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina - whether to beef up the nation\'s key disaster
response agency within the Department of Homeland Security or to create
a politically independent agency to handle national emergencies.\"\]

Witt, James Lee. \"Fixing FEMA.\" USA Today, April 27, 2006. Accessed

at:
<http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-04-27-letters-fema_x.htm>

\(4\) EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT/HOMELAND SECURITY/DEFENSE HIGHER EDUCATION
CONFERENCE, JUNE 6-8, 2006:

Latest word from Admissions Office is that 168 applications have been
processed and approved \-- several pending, including several from
non-US nationals (which have to go through Security Office, slowing down
the process by 2-3 weeks).

\(5\) WAR ON TERROR:

Harper, Jennifer. \"Al Qaeda Wields Press As Terror Weapon, Report
Finds.\" Washington Times, April 28, 2006. Accessed at:

[[http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20060427-112934-6838r.htm]{.underline}](http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20060427-112934-6838r.htm)

Ignatius, David. \"Misreading the Enemy - What We Don\'t Grasp About
Militant Islam.\" Washington Post, April 28, 2006. Accessed at:
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/27/AR2006042701692.html>

Smith, Steven Donald. \"Broad Coalition Needed to Defeat Terrorism,
General Says.\" Defense LINK News, April 27, 2006. Accessed at:

[[http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Apr2006/20060427_4956.html]{.underline}](http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Apr2006/20060427_4956.html)

\[About recent National Defense University \"Multilateral Planners
Conference\" (primary focus of which was counterterrorism.\]

B. Wayne Blanchard, Ph.D., CEM

Higher Education Project Manager

Emergency Management Institute

National Emergency Training Center

Federal Emergency Management Agency

Department of Homeland Security

16825 S. Seton, N-430

Emmitsburg, MD 21727

\(301\) 447-1262, voice

\(301\) 447-1598, fax

wayne.blanchard@dhs.gov

[[http://training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/edu]{.underline}](http://training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/edu)

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