Editorial: FEMA under fire again

Tuesday, May 1, 2007 | 7:16 a.m.

The fallout from the Federal Emergency Management Agency's many failures during Hurricane Katrina has not ended. Citing continuing problems, the American Federation of Government Employees - the largest federal employee union - recently called on Congress to conduct a full review of the agency's operations.

Leo Bosner, president of AFGE's Local 4060, which represents FEMA employees, said the union outlined its concerns in a letter to Eleanor Holmes Norton, the nonvoting delegate to the House of Representatives from the District of Columbia. He said the union wrote to Norton after failing in numerous attempts to get the attention of FEMA Director David Paulison.

"Somehow, the exemplary government agency of the 1990s has become a glaring example of government incompetence," Bosner said in a news release. "FEMA employees continue to report problems that hamper emergency operations, waste public funds and hurt employee morale."

Given that peoples' lives depend on well-trained, well-led emergency administrators and responders, these are alarming words.

Among the problems at FEMA are misspending and gross mismanagement of contracts and acquisitions, Bosner alleged. He charged that top executives of FEMA are retiring and taking jobs at companies with multimillion-dollar FEMA contracts. He said program funds authorized by Congress are being withheld.

A particularly stinging charge by Bosner, a former FEMA employee, is that highly skilled FEMA managers are being replaced by outsiders who lack emergency management experience. Many of the problems that occurred after Hurricane Katrina had to do with incompetence by FEMA's then-director, Michael Brown, who was appointed by President Bush not because of his experience, but because of his political connections.

We believe a high priority should be attached to Bosner's letter, which calls for reversing Bush's decision to place FEMA within the Homeland Security Department and for Congress or a qualified independent organization to conduct a full operational review of the agency.