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Brown's Turf Wars Sapped FEMA's Strength
"At the end of the day, I always lost," Brown said.
Soon the ODP minnow began to swallow the FEMA whale. First, much of Allbaugh's new preparedness office moved to the ODP. It was followed by FEMA's grant program for fire departments, then a terrorism training program for local emergency managers, then a series of additional grants.
ODP then merged with an Office of State and Local Government Coordination that Ridge had created. And when the department was tasked with creating a "National Preparedness Goal" to focus attention on likely disaster scenarios, Ridge assigned the job to the bulked-up new office. Meanwhile, morale plummeted at FEMA; in one survey of large agencies, it ranked last in worker satisfaction. Senior career staff members left in droves.
Ridge and his aides now believed that FEMA should be a response and recovery agency, not a preparedness agency. In an age of terrorism, they argued, preparedness needed a law enforcement component, to prevent and protect as well as get ready to respond.
But that's not the only reason the minnow ate the whale. Ridge's team wanted to knit DHS together, and FEMA kept standing apart. The ODP's director, C. Suzanne Mencer, was "very much a part of the inner circle," as Neely put it. Brown was not.
FEMA Pays the 'DHS Tax'
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 directed FEMA to develop a National Response Plan, the linchpin of post-Sept. 11 efforts to ensure smoother responses to disasters. It was a logical assignment; FEMA already oversaw a Federal Response Plan, and Brown and his staff figured they could easily tweak it into a larger government strategy for catastrophes.
But that was exactly what Ridge's people did not want. They wanted a bold new approach for a frightening new world. So a few days after the department was born, Ridge reassigned the plan to James M. Loy, a Coast Guard admiral who was running the Transportation Security Administration.
Ridge did not even inform Brown of his decision, and some offended FEMA officials, joked Ridge aide Robert B. Stephan, "had frothy sputum come out of their mouth." Ridge had to order Brown to force FEMA staffers to attend meetings about the plan.
"It was never particularly pleasant," Loy recalled. "Mike's inclination was to continue to do it the way it used to be done."
FEMA officials thought the first DHS draft was awful. "They had an extremely simplistic view, as though the whole country was the army and we were the generals," said Bosner, FEMA's union chief. "The gist was: We'll give orders and everybody will jump and say, Sir, yes, sir!" Sure enough, the draft sparked an uproar among local, state and rival federal agencies.
Ridge assigned Stephan to fix the plan, but Stephan said that Brown "never, never, never bought into the concept." Brown was most upset that, under the plan, the DHS secretary would appoint a "principal federal officer" to oversee disasters -- a FEMA official in a fire or flood, but probably a law enforcement official in an incident of terrorism. Until then, FEMA's director had reported directly to the president during all disasters.
"It was just another dad-gummed layer of bureaucracy," Brown said.
Stephan explained that FEMA would run the emergency response and recovery even if the principal officer were from another agency, but Brown still balked. "Mike didn't understand or maybe didn't want to accept that someone outside FEMA could have this designation," Stephan said.
Meanwhile, DHS continued to divert some of FEMA's funds -- the staff called this the "DHS tax" -- along with manpower and missions. "The result has led to confusion and the duplication of mission areas within the Department," Brown wrote in another memo. What was the point of an emergency preparedness and response directorate with no preparedness assets or responsibilities?
But the more Brown griped, the less his bosses listened. And the more preparedness assets FEMA lost, the less it made sense for FEMA to handle preparedness at all. "It was a vicious cycle," Brown said Ridge said he finally laid down the law during a meeting about preparedness in the fall of 2004. You lose, he remembered telling Brown: "You don't have the wherewithal to do it."
Brown said he still considered one more memo to Ridge but grudgingly relented after White House friends told him to "stop banging my head against the wall." He complained in one e-mail that everyone who questioned DHS groupthink was "labeled as 'being difficult' or 'not a team player.' "
Brown was right: He was not considered a team player. And in the White House as well as the department, FEMA was no longer considered an agency worth expanding.
"The FEMA I experienced really wanted to stay the way it was," Falkenrath said. "It was like an insurance company that swung into action after the weather got bad."
While Brown was complaining that FEMA was being destroyed by its merger into DHS, a smaller agency was airing similar complaints about its merger into FEMA. And Brown was not expressing much sympathy.
'We're in a Crisis'
In December 2004, Jeffrey A. Lowell, a St. Louis transplant surgeon who was Ridge's medical adviser, stopped by Brown's office. Ridge had asked Lowell to assess federal medical response capabilities -- especially the National Disaster Medical System, which was now part of FEMA -- and Lowell had given Brown an advance copy of his scathing report.
Lowell found out that Brown could be scathing, too.
"He said: 'How dare you? You can't give this to Ridge!' " Lowell recalled. "I was stunned. Everyone on the planet knew about these problems."
In a crisis, the NDMS was supposed to deploy and coordinate volunteer teams of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel. It was originally housed in the Department of Health and Human Services, and in 2002 a similar report commissioned by HHS Assistant Secretary Jerome M. Hauer found that the NDMS lacked a "clear, consistent vision," that it had "systematic readiness issues," and that its central command was dangerously disconnected from its 7,000 volunteers. "We knew what was wrong, and we were beginning to fix it," Hauer said.
Then the NDMS was transferred to DHS. HHS Secretary Thompson was outraged, and he pleaded with Ridge to send it back with the drug stockpile. When Hauer suggested that the move was defensible, Thompson exploded: "Don't talk about that outside this office! You work for me!"
Ultimately, Ridge decided that the NDMS would stay. "That was a terrible mistake," Thompson said. "It belonged in the health department . . . and Mike Brown was an absolute nightmare."
The turf battles intensified after conflicting presidential directives put DHS in charge of the overall response to a disaster but left HHS in charge of the medical response. "Basically, much of '03-04 was a war between DHS and HHS," a former White House official recalled.
In September 2003, HHS tried to wrest control of the NDMS from DHS during Hurricane Isabel; Brown blocked the move. In November 2004, Hauer's successor, Stewart Simonson, told his staff not to work with DHS's Lowell; he was furious that Lowell had not invited him to a medical briefing by Israeli security officers. "I did not feel Dr. Lowell was a constructive partner, and I made that very clear," Simonson said.
Meanwhile, the NDMS floundered. Lowell's report found that it was "woefully underfunded, undermanned, and too remote from DHS leadership to gain the visibility it needs." Its paid staff had shriveled from 144 to 57 and did not even include a physician. The report also included vicious anonymous quotes from NDMS volunteers complaining about FEMA's unpaid bills, faulty equipment and intransigent leadership.
"NDMS is losing functional effectiveness under FEMA's inflexible and inappropriate management," Lowell wrote.
But Ridge was about to leave the administration, and Brown believed that the NDMS teams were just upset because FEMA was enforcing some budget discipline. So nothing came of the report. That spring, Brown told an NDMS conference that he knew some teams were upset about their move to FEMA. His advice: "Get over it."
The National Association of NDMS Response Teams sent a letter to Ridge's successor, Michael Chertoff, that was even harsher than Lowell's report. It warned that two years after their move to FEMA, they were less prepared than ever: "We feel that the identity of the NDMS is being lost via FEMA's efforts to 'swallow' NDMS functions, rather than support them . . . During transition, it has been fragmented, reduced, and relegated to a position without the authority, staff, resources . . . or systems in place at FEMA to move forward with the most fundamental of readiness and critical mobilization issues."
Today, Brown acknowledges that those complaints about FEMA sound a lot like his critical memos about DHS: "I recognize the irony." But at the time, Brown dismissed the critics in e-mails to his staff as "Kids who don't get it!"
"Clearly there is a group within NDMS that does not like us," Brown wrote. "We need to nip this in the bud pronto. Whatever it takes."
Undersecretary vs. Secretary
After Chertoff was sworn in last winter, he promptly began a "Second Stage Review," preparing to reconfigure the new department. And Brown promptly began bombarding his office with memos, relitigating fights that FEMA had lost under Ridge.
On the National Response Plan: "The time is right for FEMA to be given full responsibility for all aspects."
On the shift of the ODP: "This reorganization has failed to produce tangible results."
On DHS raids on FEMA's budget: "A total of $77.9 million has been permanently lost from the base."
Brown even took his appeal public, declaring in a speech to emergency managers that all of the department's preparedness grants should go back to FEMA. Chertoff's aides, worried that Brown was boxing in the new secretary, frantically prepared a release clarifying that DHS policy had not changed.
Chertoff, a blunt-spoken former prosecutor and judge, was not swayed by Brown's appeals. "I don't box in very easily," he said. He agreed with Brown that preparedness was a serious deficiency, but not that FEMA was the place to fix it.
Instead, Chertoff endorsed a plan that had originated at the ODP -- to replace Brown's EP&R directorate with a new preparedness directorate that would absorb whatever remained of FEMA's preparedness mission. He agreed with Brown's bureaucratic rivals that FEMA was too busy responding to daily disasters to focus on the long-term planning needed to prepare for a major catastrophe.
DHS officials dangled the possibility of heading the new directorate in front of Brown, but he was not interested. "It's a Hobson's choice," Brown e-mailed a friend in the White House. "Take something that I don't believe in and that I don't think will work, or stay at FEMA and try to keep it from failing. Geez, what a life!"
Brown sent one last-ditch memo to Chertoff's deputy, warning that under the new plan, "FEMA is doomed to failure and loss of mission." But his appeal was rejected, and after his White House contacts said they could not find him a job elsewhere in the administration, Brown decided to submit his resignation after Labor Day.
FEMA's career professionals made similar choices. Eric Tolbert, chief of the agency's response division, said he quit this year because DHS was siphoning away "huge chunks" of his budget. Chertoff points out that FEMA's budget has increased since Sept. 11, but Tolbert said the periodic incursions "dramatically impacted my ability to maintain a readiness level."
For example, a FEMA exercise simulating a Category 4 hurricane in New Orleans was suspended when funding ran out. "Those of us involved became pretty disenchanted near the end," Tolbert said.
'Can I Quit Now? Can I Go Home?'
On Sunday, Aug. 28, Brown was supposed to be finalizing his resignation letter. Instead, he was on his way to Louisiana for Katrina and chuckling into his BlackBerry. Hagin had e-mailed from Bush's ranch, teasing that his imminent departure no longer seemed so imminent: You didn't get out in time!
Brown would be gone soon enough.
His agency, as he had predicted, was not ready. Its relations with state and local agencies, as he had warned, were in shambles. Three of its five operations chiefs for natural disasters and nine of its 10 regional directors were temporary fill-ins. And as Katrina approached, Brown and his aides were still balking at a DHS directive to join an interagency crisis management group -- and ignoring DHS requests for information.
"Let them play their reindeer games as long as they are not turning around and tasking us with their stupid questions," Brown's deputy chief of staff e-mailed him.
Once Katrina came ashore, the newly completed National Response Plan spectacularly failed its first test. Chertoff neglected to activate it until the day after landfall, and Brown resisted the secretary's efforts to name him the principal federal official. And the 426-page plan proved to be mostly irrelevant once local responders were unable to participate; FEMA had not finalized the "Catastrophic Annex" that was supposed to guide that situation.
"Can I quit now?" Brown e-mailed a press aide during the storm. "Can I go home?
Katrina also triggered the biggest deployment in the National Disaster Medical System's history. Thompson called the result "a national embarrassment." In an after-action report, NDMS team leader Timothy Crowley, a doctor on the Harvard Medical School faculty, called the deployment a "TOTAL FAILURE."
Crowley's team was summoned late, then sent to Texas instead of Louisiana, then parked in Baton Rouge for a week while New Orleans suffered. When the team was finally sent to the disaster zone, it was immediately overwhelmed, but NDMS leaders told Lowell there was no help available, even though he later found out that a host of other teams "had been sitting on their butts for days waiting and asking for missions."
"The current management team and disaster response is completely dysfunctional," Crowley wrote. "I never learned what sort of political agenda or just plain incompetence or stupidity were behind these decisions." His report was harsh, but not atypical.
"I was holding back!" he said.
Katrina has inspired a round of soul-searching throughout DHS. A terrorist attack, after all, would not provide several days' warning; Chertoff has vowed to "retool FEMA, maybe even radically, to increase our ability to deal with catastrophic events."
But Brown believes that if DHS leaders had not spent so much time retooling FEMA in the first place, his name would not be a synonym for poor performance. He's proud of the losing battles he fought inside DHS, and he could not resist a final dig at his old bosses.
"To this day," he said, "I'm not sure they've got a vision for the department."
Staff writer Spencer S. Hsu and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
