Brown's Turf Wars Sapped FEMA's Strength

"I wasn't happy where we were on preparedness," Chertoff said.

Neither was Brown. He's now a punch line for late-night comics, but in the months before Katrina he was still firing off memos about "the absence of effective leadership" and "complete lack of accountability for results" at DHS. He wrote that Ridge's decisions had promoted "unfocused empire-building in duplicative mission areas" and predicted that Chertoff's restructuring was "doomed to fail."

As usual, his sky-is-falling pleas were ignored, and Brown finally admitted defeat. He planned to submit his resignation in early September.

But on Aug. 29, the sky fell. Brown had warned that his agency would be unprepared for a catastrophe, and he was right.

'Bye-Bye, Get Out of My Office'

On June 5, 2002, White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. called then-FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh with stunning news. President Bush was about to announce a secret plan to merge 22 agencies into a Department of Homeland Security, and FEMA was on the list.

Allbaugh immediately decided to quit. His handpicked deputy, his old friend Mike Brown, would replace him once the department took shape.

"Joe signed on to be agency head, not to play second fiddle," said Bruce P. Baughman, a former senior FEMA official. "He didn't want to be reporting to anybody but the president."

After managing Bush's 2000 campaign, Allbaugh had been exiled to FEMA when he lost a power struggle with the other members of Bush's "Iron Triangle," Karl Rove and Karen Hughes. But FEMA had enjoyed a renaissance under President Bill Clinton, who had entrusted it to his Arkansas emergency management director, James Lee Witt, and elevated the post to Cabinet level. And after Sept. 11, Allbaugh recognized that his obscure agency could take a lead role in the fight against terrorism.

With Vice President Cheney's support, Allbaugh cleared out FEMA's second floor to make room for an Office for National Preparedness. He also began plotting to seize the Justice Department's three-year-old Office for Domestic Preparedness (ODP), which already distributed anti-terrorism grants. Allbaugh wanted FEMA to oversee the inevitable cascade of post-Sept. 11 emergency dollars.

The White House officials who designed DHS also envisioned a more robust FEMA, leading America's efforts to prepare for and respond to terrorist attacks as well as natural disasters. Ridge, Bush's homeland security adviser before he became DHS secretary, was a FEMA fan; as a congressman, he had written the Stafford Act, which governs the agency. The self-styled "Gang of Five" -- the mid-level aides who sculpted DHS in the White House basement -- also hoped to strengthen FEMA into a "prime-time agency," said Richard A. Falkenrath, a member of the gang. It would no longer be an independent Cabinet agency -- it would not even be called FEMA -- but it would swallow the ODP and control all federal emergency grants.

The goal was for FEMA to "go away and become something bigger, more important and more central to the role of the department," said Lawlor, another member of the gang.

FEMA's staff worried that their expertise with natural disasters would get lost in a terrorism-focused department. But while Ridge said the administration was aware of the "huge angst" at FEMA, it never considered preserving its independence. "If you didn't have a FEMA-like agency at Homeland Security, you'd have to create one," he said. Overall, Ridge figured, FEMA would benefit from the overhaul, because it would gain control of the ODP.