Who else should he take responsibility for? The local authorities? The La authorities? The looters?
Nope, but stuff like this...
Quote:
WASHINGTON — Michael Brown, who Friday was sent back to Washington, is the poster boy for what has gone wrong with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The nation’s federal disaster agency has been politicized and dismantled over the past four years, and Brown, who remains as its director, is a symptom of that transformation, disaster and government efficiency experts say.
The Bush administration has filled FEMA’s top jobs with political patronage appointees with no emergency management experience, cut disaster preparedness budgets and marginalized the agency by merging it with the new anti-terrorism bureaucracy, say those experts, who include four former senior FEMA officials.
The number of career disaster management professionals in senior FEMA jobs has been cut by more than 50 percent since 2000, federal personnel records show.
Brown “has become a symbol of what’s wrong with FEMA, and ultimately he has to go,” said Paul C. Light, a New York University public service professor. “The real problem here is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with the appointments process. It’s the people who decided to put him in place and put all those politicals in place.”
George Haddow, a former FEMA deputy chief of staff under President Bill Clinton and a co-author of an emergency management textbook, called what happened in the past four years the “deconstruction of the most robust emergency management and effective response system in the world.”
In 2000, 40 percent of the top FEMA jobs were held by career workers who rose through the ranks of the agency, including chief of staff. By 2004, that figure was less than 19 percent, and the deputy director/chief of staff job is held by a former TV anchor turned political operative.
Gen. Julius Becton Jr., a FEMA director in the Reagan administration, said the agency had become too political and should be run by a nonpolitical appointee.
Of the top 15 FEMA spots in Washington, the only persons who have experience or have a single permanent job are the agency’s top lawyer, its equal rights director, its technology chief and its inner-agency planning chief.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigating arm of Congress, summarized the agency’s history this way:
“The agency’s performance during hurricanes and an earthquake in the late 1980s and early 1990s generated intense criticism and raised doubts about its ability to respond to disasters. …
“In the wake of congressional investigations, President Bill Clinton in 1993 appointed James Lee Witt, who ran emergency management in Arkansas, to head the embattled federal agency. Witt is widely credited with turning FEMA into a model for disaster response.”
Just before FEMA was merged into the new Department of Homeland Security in 2003, insiders said that problems were sure to develop.
