The recall of Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Mike Brown last week from the disaster on the Gulf Coast to Washington was, perhaps, the perfect Bush administration moment. Faced with growing criticism of the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina and the revelation that the nation's disaster-management agency is run by a man whose primary job qualification seems to have been sharing a college dorm room with one of the president's political cronies, the White House acted swiftly … to control the political fallout.
Brown wasn't fired -- that would be too much like an admission that he shouldn't have had his job in the first place. And the Bush administration didn't come to the belated realization that FEMA is important and decide to clean the agency up -- that would focus attention on other, Brown-esque figures with dubious qualifications. Instead, the administration moved Brown out of the limelight in the hopes that the controversy would die down.
This, however, raises questions about Brown's boss, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff. He, unlike some in the administration, is not an idiot. Those who have gone on record about him seem to think he was a good prosecutor and a decent guy. I even have a friend, his son's camp counselor, who says good things about him. This same friend is a sharp kid, personable, and a crackerjack summer camp counselor -- but nobody's ever suggested him for a high-level Department of Homeland Security job. That, of course, is because he doesn't have any relevant experience. Sort of like Chertoff, whose record shows no previous history handling large-scale organization mergers or any of Homeland Security's major responsibilities.
On one level, the failure of anyone in authority to note these simple facts seems to indicate confusion about what DHS is supposed to do. It was created after September 11, so people understand it has something to do with terrorism. Chertoff, meanwhile, used to prosecute terrorism cases in the Justice Department, so his appointment seems to make sense. Seems to. The thing is, even in the post–9-11 world, the Justice Department is still tasked with prosecuting terrorists. The FBI, which investigates terrorism cases and hunts down the evidence necessary to disrupt and preempt plots, is also part of Justice. Meanwhile, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence-gathering entities also play a role here and, well, none of them are part of DHS. Neither is the military's Special Operations Command. Indeed, the only DHS component agency whose responsibilities even resemble investigating terrorists is the Secret Service, which is a very small piece of the pie and, though it is famous for its presidential-protection mission, it mostly handles counterfeiting cases. (Why? It's complicated. The Secret Service is part of Treasury.) DHS handles transportation security, infrastructure protection, border control, and -- perhaps most crucially -- is supposed to handle post-attack (or hurricane) recovery. Chertoff has a background in none of those things.
Not that I mean to pick on him in particular. This administration, run by a president who seems not particularly interested in policy, has never been big on the idea of qualifications. But since the press is allegedly "waking up" in the aftermath of Katrina, perhaps they'll start looking at this. I had the chance to see former Attorney General John Ashcroft speak last week, and he argued, sensibly, that during his tenure at Justice his top priorities were counterterrorism and fixing the notoriously screwed-up INS (since relocated to DHS). Naturally enough, Ashcroft had experience in neither of those fields. He was, arguably, instead chosen for his strong appeal to the anti-abortion lobby (and, perhaps, the neo-confederate lobby, but that's another story). His successor, Alberto Gonzalez, likewise has no experience with key Justice areas. He, too, is the president's buddy. Colin Powell was a widely-respected figure when he was appointed Secretary of State, but he had never been a diplomat and -- most astoundingly -- didn't like to travel. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow isn't an economist, has never worked with financial markets, has no experience with his department's international role, but he did used to run a heavily-regulated firm in the freight rail industry, the cornerstone of our 19th-century economy. His predecessor ran an aluminum monopoly. The Secretary of Defense? The less said about Donald Rumsfeld the better.
These are the people given the important jobs! And they're not even the worst examples. These folks were at least good at something. Contrast that with the administration's treatment of the Labor Department. Labor, to be honest, is not all that important in the scheme of things in an era when the administration shows no interest in enforcing labor laws. But still, who's Elaine Chao? That's right -- the Senate Majority Whip's wife. Her deputy never worked on labor issues, but did used to work for ... the same senator. Knowing how to talk about weapons of mass destruction is an important skill for any Bush official, but his CIA director, Porter Goss, seems genuinely confused on some of the basic issues. One could go on in this vein for quite some time.
The reverse list -- of officials who manage to handle their duties despite never having dealt with the issues under their domain -- is shorter. It was odd to once again pick a Secretary of State who'd never been a diplomat, but Condoleezza Rice seems to do an adequate job. If the Department of Health and Human Services' function is to make it harder for poor people to get treatment when they're sick, then chief Mike Leavitt is arguably the American most qualified for the job, with the possible exception of Phil Bredesen -- and Leavitt's doing a bang-up job so far. Leavitt's predecessor, Tommy Thompson, was the Leavitt of his day in Wisconsin -- as governor, he was a veritable scourge of the Milwaukee underclass and beloved by the voters for it. As a federal policymaker he pioneered the idea that getting single mothers to work longer hours with less child care assistance was a good character-building measure. (He had the good sense to denounce the Bush Medicare bill, but not until after it had passed, Bush was reelected, and he had left the job.) The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration leadership team seems to be on the up-and-up. Beyond that, it's slim pickings indeed.
There are two possible explanations for this phenomenon. One is that Bush himself is so eminently unqualified for his job that the rot just spreads. In college, I put a buddy up to asking Thompson how it felt to be working for a man so much less qualified than he was. (Thompson spent 14 years as governor of a swing state; Bush spent six years running Texas, which is of course deeply red, and a state where the governor enjoys far less authority.) Naturally, Thompson dodged the question, but he didn't dispute the premise. The other possibility is that Republicans are so convinced that government is inefficient and full of people who don't know what they're doing that it just doesn't occur to them to do it any other way.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
