Hurricanes Past and Future Speed Hiring by FEMA

With the next hurricane season only three months away, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is adding employees in Washington and regional offices so that it can deploy staffers to disasters this year while also undertaking a multiyear effort to help Gulf Coast states recover from Hurricane Katrina.

FEMA has cut its hiring time to 37 days, from the normal 45 to 60 days. The streamlined employment process includes electronic fingerprint checks that are turned around within 24 hours as part of background investigations. Personnel officials hired 80 people in a single day last week for an array of jobs that provide support or direct services to disaster victims.

The hiring push is called 95/95 inside FEMA -- to fill vacant jobs so that each FEMA bureau has 95 percent of its authorized staff within 95 days. The countdown began last month, according to a memo sent to top FEMA officials by Michael J. Hall , director of the agency's personnel division.

The staffing initiative could help FEMA bounce back from Katrina. The agency was blamed for a sluggish response to the hurricane, which claimed about 1,300 lives.

Congressional hearings and reviews, including a House investigation led by Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), suggested that the agency had undergone a "brain drain" in recent years, losing too many experienced hands in key positions and failing to replace them with skilled professionals. The House report estimated that FEMA had 500 vacant jobs at the time Katrina struck.

Last week, Bruce Baughman , president of the National Emergency Management Association, described FEMA as "vastly understaffed at both the headquarters and regional offices" in testimony prepared for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He said workload issues have made it difficult for FEMA to retain employees.

The issue of staffing shortages, and the agency's morale, is a sensitive matter inside the agency. Nicol Andrews , a FEMA spokeswoman, said personnel officials were too busy last week to discuss the hiring initiative.

Andrews said FEMA has been increasing its workforce since Katrina hit New Orleans and other Gulf Coast communities in late August. On Sept. 3, FEMA had 20,434 employees; by Feb. 18 it had 27,575.

Most of the growth took place in a job category called "disaster assistance employee," the temporary workers hired for a specific disaster until no longer needed. FEMA added more than 6,800 disaster assistance employees after Katrina.

Slightly more than 1,900 of FEMA's employees are permanent and full-time, and an additional 700 hold full-time jobs, known as core positions, that are assigned to disaster relief efforts for two to four years.

Under the 95/95 initiative this year, FEMA will add nearly 1,300 employees. About 620 will be hired for permanent positions and about 650 will be added to the core workforce.

The new staff, Andrews said, "is to help fill up the need presented by Katrina." At the end of the hiring cycle, FEMA estimates, it will have more than 2,500 full-time employees, she said.

In addition to speeding up hiring, the Homeland Security Department also plans to train about 1,500 department employees to staff FEMA "surge teams" in the event of a crisis, Andrews said. As an example, she said, employees at the Coast Guard, U.S. Fire Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement could be trained and designated for deployment on a moment's notice.

Past federal efforts to throw bodies at problems have not always succeeded, in part because of the learning curve for complex and arcane federal programs. With the hurricane season starting June 1, there is not much time to prepare, especially if FEMA has lost too much institutional know-how, as some critics believe.

Andrews thinks the hiring strategy will work. "We are looking for trained professionals who can bring their expertise to the table--with talent and skill sets--and we can add the knowledge about FEMA's programs," she said.

Staff writer Spencer Hsu contributed to this column. Stephen Barr's e-mail address isbarrs@washpost.com.