Katrina and the Case for Risk

The flood that exposed a bureaucracy

By Scott Berinato

September 08, 2005 — CSO —

The question of whether or not the Department of Homeland Security is too big a bureaucracy with too many missions has dogged the agency since even before it was created. But it always has been a theoretical question for wonks and think tanks.

Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing floods made the theoretical visceral. And it provided shocking evidence that the answer is Yes. DHS is too big and supports too many missions.

But there's more texture to the answer than that. Besides its size and lack of focus, DHS has also elevated some of its missionsanti-terrorism, for examplewhile enfeebling otherslike emergency preparedness. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was once a Cabinet-level agency with historically decentralized operations. The power of FEMA's decentralization was its ability to understand threats specific to local geographies and have local expertise inform the responses. Once FEMA was subsumed by DHS and centralized in Washington, it lost the very model that made it effective.

This became painfully evident last week as images and reports from the Gulf Coast told one story, and DHS leadersand we use that term looselyin Washington told another. FEMA chief Michael Brown managed to blame victims for not evacuating the city, despite the fact many didn't have the means to evacuate. He also was quoted as saying, "I've heard no reports of unrest" and, "I actually think the security is pretty darn good. There's some really bad people out there that are causing some problems, and it seems to me that every time a bad person wants to scream or cause a problem, there's somebody there with a camera to stick it in their face." That is, its the medias fault.

On NPR's All Things Considered, host Robert Siegel asked DHS secretary Michael Chertoff about the thousands of people in the New Orleans Convention Center, surviving with no food or water amongst corpses and human waste, and when they would get relief. "The one thing about an episode like this is if you talk to someone and you get a rumor or you get someone's anecdotal version of something, I think it's dangerous to extrapolate it all over the place," Chertoff said. Later, Chertoff and Brown were forced to admit they didn't know about the widely documented, verified, horrifying conditions at the Convention Center.

Brown's and Chertoff's knee-jerk reactions were remarkably similar: The buck stops somewhere else and if you try to pin the blame here, you're just part of that media spin machine that sticks cameras in faces and promulgates rumors.

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