How the Bush Administration dismantled FEMA and turned a bad storm into a tragedy.

With outrage still building over the excruciatingly inadequate federal response to Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is facing a political storm of its own. Tracing recent federal emergency policy, there were some clear warning signs that FEMA has been set up to fail.

A year ago, during the wave of hurricanes and floods that battered the South, seven alternative newsweeklies collaborated on an investigation of FEMA’s approach to natural disasters under the Bush administration. The series showed that FEMA, which had in the ’90s won widespread praise for advancing its approach to natural disasters, was in a severe backslide.

Emergency managers from both inside and outside of government said in the story that President Bush has drained FEMA’s natural disaster programs in a series of policy and budget changes, including:

• The appointment of political cronies rather than disaster experts to top posts. The disgraced former director of FEMA, one-time attorney Michael Brown, took on the job from President Bush’s first FEMA director, Joe Allbaugh, the president’s former chief of staff from Texas. Neither had significant experience in managing disasters.

“Our professional staff are being systematically replaced by politically connected novices,” a 16-year FEMA veteran warned Congress last summer.

• A philosophical shift by the Bush administration away from federal responsibility. As the weeklies’ investigative piece pointed out, in a May 15, 2001, appearance before a Senate appropriations subcommittee, Allbaugh signaled that a new, stripped-down approach would be applied at FEMA. “Expectations of when the federal government should be involved may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level,” he said.

• Cuts to key “disaster mitigation” programs—the measures taken in advance to minimize the damage caused by natural disasters. Such programs, which have proven to be both cost-effective and life-saving, included FEMA’s Project Impact, which was ended by the White House in 2001.

Federal funding of post-disaster mitigation efforts designed to protect people and property has been cut in half.

• The folding of FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security, where the emphasis on terrorist threats has left natural disaster work increasingly marginalized. In testimony to Congress in March 2004, James Lee Witt, who directed FEMA during the 1990s, said he was “extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded” because of the merger of FEMA into the DHS. “I hear from emergency managers…nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared.”

A year later, these concerns have only intensified.

“We are so much less than what we were in 2000,” said a senior FEMA official in a Sept. 1 Washington Post article. Another FEMA veteran said, “We have less capability today than we did on Sept. 11.”

FEMA “is being, in effect, systematically downgraded and all but dismantled by the Department of Homeland Security,” wrote Eric Holdeman, director of emergency management in King County, Wash., in an Aug. 30 Washington Post op-ed.

And in an interview with the online journal Salon, Eric Tolbert, a former North Carolina state emergency director who was a high-ranking FEMA official from 2002 until February of this year, drew a direct connection between FEMA’s recent breakdown and the calamity unfolding in that city. In the summer of 2004, he said, the agency ran a “tabletop exercise” in Baton Rouge as part of an effort to craft a new plan for dealing with a serious hurricane strike in the New Orleans area. But then, the money dried up. “Unfortunately,” Tolbert said, “we were not able to finish the plan.”