There is a widespread consensus that something “went wrong” in the government's response to Hurricane Katrina. In the first weeks, the Bush administration was clearly anxious to pin the blame on the Democratic governor of Louisiana and the Democratic mayor of New Orleans. But even the president has now taken some responsibility. The departure of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Director Michael Brown, in an administration that is more inclined to give out medals to people who preside over failures than to fire them, is as close as we will get to an admission that “something” at the federal level went wrong.
So what was it? How did we get to the point where bureaucracy got in the way of saving lives? Is it simply the incompetence of a former Arabian Horse Association executive in the wrong job at the wrong time? Or can we find explanations in the management philosophy of the White House?
Management philosophies tend to be non-partisan, which is why they so rarely attract press or public attention. A former colleague of mine in the Clinton administration has compared the Clinton-Gore management agenda to the Bush management agenda. According to John Kamensky, now at IBM, there are some similarities. The Bush administration, for example, continued to focus on measuring the results of government programs that began in the Clinton administration, including the emphasis on e-government.
But there are differences in management philosophy, too. Once a full investigation into the response to Katrina is under way, these differences may turn out to have had significant effects. For instance, during the Clinton administration, Vice President Al Gore, who ran the federal government's management-reform efforts -- or “reinventing government,” as it was called -- constantly emphasized empowering front-line federal employees so that they could do their jobs with a minimum of red tape. This philosophy was not very popular with their bosses in the civil service, nor with their political ones, but it was frequently reinforced by the vice president himself and by the reinventing-government team. It involved, among other things, working with the federal unions that represent many front-line workers in order to get them to help us figure out what was really taking place on the ground.
In contrast, the Bush administration has centralized its reform efforts and pushed unions to the side. In so doing, it sent a powerful message to its front-line workers: Don't take any initiative or you might end up in trouble. The result? Story after story like the one from Dan Wessel, owner of a transportation company with a contract to move supplies who didn't get the green light from FEMA until it was too late. Aid from around America and from around the world was offered in a timely manner, but no one was empowered to get it there. In news story after news story, FEMA officials have been fingered as the people deferred to red tape and, in so doing, turned down timely help.
The FEMA job is to manage a large and diverse network of helping agencies. As Kamensky and others have pointed out, managing networks is a fundamentally different exercise than managing a top-down bureaucracy and yet, in the early crucial hours, too many people were sticking to nonsensical protocols or saying “no” when they should have been “getting to yes.”
How did FEMA lose its ability to manage the multiple sources of help that it had traditionally managed? The major fault lies with the decision to fold FEMA into the new Department of Homeland Security. Many, myself included, advised against this. Those of us who worked on the reinventing-government team had seen the transformation of FEMA, which began in 1993 with President Clinton's appointment of James Lee Witt. Under him, FEMA went from an agency that Congress wanted to abolish to an agency that worked. The fundamental concept in Witt's turnaround of the agency was the “all hazards” approach. Underlying it was the realization that regardless of cause -- earthquake, hurricane, tornado -- there were similarities in disaster response that could be planned for.
Putting FEMA into the Homeland Security Department took the agency backward. Not only did it bury what was once a freestanding agency in a new and unwieldy bureaucracy, but the decision erased the lessons from the 1990s that had allowed FEMA to serve the country so well. FEMA went from all hazards to one hazard: terrorism. Its traditional mission -- helping states and localities prevent natural disasters and prepare for them -- was pushed aside.
In the end the story will be less about how much money was spent and more about how it was spent. In one example, local officials complained that once FEMA's grant-making authority to state and local governments had been centralized in the Homeland Security Department, you could get money for protective chemical suits but not for flood control.
Finally, however, fault lies with the failure of this White House to understand the implications of its own post-September 11 disaster planning. The first four paragraphs on page 44 of the National Response Plan, adopted in December of 2004, make it perfectly clear that standard procedures regarding federal, state, and local operations can be expedited or ignored if lives are at stake in a catastrophic event. The plan itself anticipated the New Orleans situation, where police officers and other first responders were stuck on rooftops saving their own families and frequently unable to get to their jobs. And yet Justice Department lawyers argued about the use of military force and FEMA officials waited for signatures and orders while people died.
Hurricanes, earthquakes, and terrorists will always end up killing people. But bureaucracy should not. That's the lesson from Hurricane Katrina. Let's hope it is learned before the next disaster.
Elaine Kamarck is a lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. She served in the Clinton administration, where she created and managed the National Performance Review, from 1993 to 1997.
