There are two huge problems with FEMA and Homeland Security the bureaucracy which is in need of reform and a total lack of leadership.
Restructuring FEMA for Quick Response
One of the main problems with FEMA is the slowness to get aid to hurricane survivors. Bureaucracies require authorizing paperwork (Red Tape) before anything can be done. This is necessary in the FEMA bureaucracy because control at the local level will be lost by its leaders and procedures both fiscal and otherwise will be violated. This brings every unplanned action that has to be done immediately to a halt and destroys the capability of workers in the field trying to bring relief to disaster victims. First response workers like firemen and police get around this problem through situation training drills where detailed procedures lead to automatic decisions and actions.
Problems in the field where on the spot decisions need to be made can best be solved by the implementation of Work Improvement Teams (WITs) which I have recommended. In this case the teams are made up of personnel in the field who can quickly get together to come to a consensus as to how best to solve an immediate problem. In addition where individuals are dispersed from other team members modern communications can allow consensus to be gotten without a meeting.
There may be an advantage to having team members of varying special skills to bring a knowledge base to the field with connections for access to resources. The WIT is preauthorized to make all the decisions necessary to bring immediate aid to disaster victims. Judgment as to whether the team has made the proper decision in specific instances occurs much later in a review of how improved responses can be made. The FEMA command center should not make field decisions nor should it give approval for them. These decisions are reserved for the on site WIT. The primary function of the command center is to coordinate and deliver the much needed resources to the WIT at the disaster site. Note that the decision making process is driven down to the lowest level of the FEMA organization.
This is in contrast to the FEMA bureaucracy where nearly all decisions are made on the basis of rules or higher up in the organization. The WIT structure makes for a highly effective as well as efficient organization where two to three levels of a bureaucratic organization are no longer needed in the decision making process and are eliminated. In order to reduce the Red Tape modern database management systems are also required with communications at the disaster site. These databases are especially needed to verify the identity those who are requesting aid instantly. The failure to properly identify individuals lead to immense fraud losses and much embarrassment for FEMA. Even with proper identification of those needing aid there was still problems with the delivery of the aid.
As an example in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina a local official while standing in the midst of rubble on the Gulf Coast decried on national television that “Trailers were needed for emergency housing NOW”. Adding “I don’t care what it takes just send them down here and we will decide how to use them”. FEMA has rules trailers must be hooked up for water and sewage and must be a specified height off the ground. Weeks later people were still living in the shells of there destroyed homes or in tents none of them have water and sewage connections and the trailers are still parked on mass in a field somewhere in Georgia.
Rescuing Homeland Security and Protecting America
What most Americans are afraid of is that Homeland Security is just another failed bureaucracy that wastes our tax dollars and does little to protect us. What Homeland Security needs is an organization structure which will allow for innovation and flexibility. Bureaucracies cannot and don’t produce innovation. I recommend that high level Work Improvement Teams (WITs) be implemented to remedy this problem.
Innovation is the key and here is why. For example millions has been spend on the development of machines to detect bombs. The machines we have don’t work very well and are very expensive. But the Israelis have been using bomb-sniffing dogs successfully for years. Yes we have bomb sniffing dogs but what’s new here is we don’t seam to know how important they are or how to use them. The dogs are not nailed to the floor like a machine they can find a bomb in a few minutes from a distance in a crowd of people and in a stacks of luggage. Show me a machine that can do that. What Homeland Security should do is take one of those closed military bases and begin raising and training dogs. They should train thousands of them enough for every major airport and all subway entrances. Its the cheapest protection that money can buy. Dogs can be trained to find unique chemicals they even detect cancer in humans.
The media has identified 25 nuclear storage sites at universities that are left unguarded the perfect supply depot for those wanting to make a dirty bomb. Where is our Homeland Security? The least they can do is find out what’s going on before the media delivers another blow.
Congress seams to be unable to determine the type of threat faced in various parts of the country. What we know about our terrorist enemies is that when they decide to place a bomb they even count the number of people who will be walking in the street in order to determine the most deadly time to set off the bomb. They want to kill as many Americans as they can not American cows. Wyoming got 35 dollars per person for terrorist response and New York got 5 dollars per person.
The FEMA bureaucratic blunder dubbed by the media as the “FEMA Ice Follies” apparently went on for months. Here is what happened. When hurricane Katrina was approaching a computer “told” FEMA authorities how many truckloads of ice to order for disaster relief including enough for the city of New Orleans. When 80% of New Orleans was evacuated they only needed about 40% of the ice. But instead of admitting their mistake and letting the ice melt they solved the problem by moving the trucks all over the country with their refrigerators running 24 hours a day waiting for the next hurricane. At last 250 truckloads were found in Maine many more in other states at a considerable distance from the gulf coast. To top things off FEMA paid $35 thousand for each truck load of ice which regularly costs only $6 thousand. You could dismiss this a mistake that could have been made by any organization except for the fact that bureaucracies are known for their lack of common sense. This is a direct result of a bureaucracy’s robotic behavior of rigidly following a set of rules in this case a computer printout a common occurrence found in nearly all large bureaucracies.
Its important to realize that bureaucracies squelch innovation and cover up all kinds of waste and mismanagement which the public never sees unless the media is following up on them. The bureaucracy reacts to these failures only when discovered by the public by implementing tighter rules adding more red tape.
Katrina Still a Continuing Bureaucratic Disaster after Six Months
Many of the real human problems caused by Katrina are still not solved in New Orleans. The decision about what to do with unlivable storm damaged homes was delegated to the leaders of the local neighbor hoods by mayor Ray Nagin contributing to the ongoing disaster. Now six months after the storm little has been done with unlivable homes which should have been bulldozed months ago. While in Hope Arkansas officials are asking why hundreds of FEMA manufactured homes still wait at the airport with no place to go. FEMA is ending hotel and motel payments for Katrina victims and they have no place to go. Meanwhile basic service workers have no place to live in New Orleans. The disaster continues even as Congress continues to investigate the disaster.
The underlying reasons for the bureaucratic disaster are in several areas. First the failure of leadership through the appointment of politically connected individuals such as Michael Brown to head FEMA and his chief of staff Patrick James Rhode. Brown had almost no experience in responding to disasters while Rhode had absolutely no experience what so ever and he was running the day to day activities of FEMA. Michael Chertoff head of Homeland Security a former appeals court judge who helped write anti-terrorists laws after 9-11escaped many of the criticisms leveled at brown for being out of touch with the problem. This does not speak well for Chertoff in two areas. First the beginning years of a bureaucracy must be lead by a strong leader who will guide the culture of the organization and bring it into sink with the organizations mission and second because he has demonstrated that he is not a hands-on-responder he is the very type of person that you don’t want leading Homeland Security in case of a terrorist attack.
The real bright star that emerged from this disaster was Vice-Admiral Thad Allen of the US Coast Guard which has the duel “Responding Mission” and “Service Mission”. A person with his qualities is the ideal candidate for the Head of Homeland Security. He was the take-charge leader who brought together all of the stake-holding parties Mayor Ray Nagin, Governor Kathleen Blanco and Lt. General Russel Honore who successfully lead the 20.000 national guard troops. Note that this was an on-the-scene team of leaders the way that all disasters need to be handled. This is not the normal way that bureaucracies are organized. You will also note that while Thad Allen was leading the recovery Michael Chertoff the person who is the head of Homeland Security was nowhere to be found this does not make me feel secure for future disasters.
Second the problems of combining of two bureaucracies with different missions is not understood by this administration and by Congress. FEMA has a “Responding Mission” much like that of fire fighters who respond to fires while Homeland Security has a “Service Mission” like the FBI and US Army. Leaders in the US Coast Guard have experience in both missions and in my opinion could be our best hope in successfully responding to any disaster. Michael Brown made a point of the differing missions before Congress but the point may have been lost in his vitriolic blaming of others and not himself.
The third failure is in the Bureaucratic organization of Homeland Security itself. The inherent nature of all bureaucracies is that they require approval (read tape) before any action can be taken at the site of the disaster. While bureaucrats wait miles away from the disaster site to give approval or disapprove to these requests. The resulting slow reaction can take weeks and even months. This the primary reason why Vice Admiral Thad Allen’s team on the scene was successful in bringing the disaster under control. It not clear that FEMA or Homeland Security or even Congress understands the critical nature of an on the scene team lead by the Homeland Security Director.
A fourth problem is in the critical need for a modern database management system for Homeland Security. These systems are the only way to reduce Red Tape by having the needed information instantly available on line. They take a couple of years to develop but are critical to the success of the agency.
National Identification Cards
The requirement for instant on the spot identification of all Americans should be a national priority. We need a national identity card that is counterfeit proof that works in conjunction with your eye or by thumb print. Fifty years ago most people who came to this country came seeking work. Now we also have gangs of killers and terrorists crossing our borders both legally and illegally and once they are in the country they have nearly complete anonymity.
There are many benefits from a national identity card. Stolen identities can be significantly reduced. It hampers the ability of those without ID cards from roaming freely within our society using false IDs to get jobs, barrow money, and collect welfare and Medicaid. Ex-convicts and sex offenders become visible. The benefits far outweigh the big brother arguments against universal IDs. The savings to business alone in the billions. Crime will also be significantly reduced. But for disaster relief with positive ID the mountains of Red Tape simply go away resulting in a significant reduction in fraud and speeds relief to legitimate victims. This can happen if modern communications and Computer Database management systems are also implemented for quickly processing the need for resources.
Border Security
Our Coast Guard and our Boarder Guard should be beefed-up to stop all illegal immigration. We should setup employment offices on the border for American employers who want to hire aliens legally. They should have temporary IDs, work permits and a job before entering the US. There is no reason to have Mexican illegal aliens dieing in our southwest desserts year after year. Our Mexican and Canadian borders could also be better patrolled using unmanned aircraft which can stay aloft for many hours with monitoring cameras both day and night.
Aliens should not have US state drivers licenses. They should use the licenses from their own country which is common practice in Europe. Having a US state drivers license defeats the reason for the National ID card and opens the way for terrorists to drive tanker trucks.
Planning for Disaster
All disaster planning should begin at the county level by determining the threats and the “needs” for the county. There should be several plans that are based on threat level for hurricanes. The force level of the hurricane should determine who is to be evacuated and how to respond to the emergency. Environmental disasters, tornadoes, wild fires should each have its own unique disaster evacuation plan.
The local county “needs” for resources and services are then coordinated directly with the state plan and finally with the Federal government for their resources thus completing the plan. Note that there are three parties to emergency planning. Local county governments drive the plan and are ultimately responsible for the plan they are the stakeholders. They bring their demographics and resource needs to the state for assistance in planning how the resources of the state should be made available. Then the combined local and state plan is merged with the required federal resources and the county plans are completed. The final step is publicizing the plan so that the public knows what resources will be available and how they are to be evacuated. The key is bottom up planning, where top down planning is either wasteful or inadequate. When an impending disaster is seen all that is needed is agreement by state, local and Federal governments on which plan to use. The particulars of the plan are then immediately broadcasted to the public.
Getting the Public on Board
This is not an easy step convincing the public to prepare for a disaster when much of the population will not even wear their car seat belts. Be careful about lumping all Americans under the label of “the public”. The fact is that we are a mix of socioeconomic and ethnic groups. Each of these groups will require a unique approach to get them to “buy in” on preparing for a disaster. How ever its done it is important that people living in hurricane zones should be made aware of evacuations plans and know how they personally are to get out of the danger zone.
There is a right approach and wrong approach for getting the public on board for evolutionary change. I offer this example, in the 1960’s the city of London converted all their street lamps to orange halogen lamps, which were better for seeing in the fog. They had one other advantage the cost of operating them was significantly less than regular street lamps. When they were first installed on the East Coast they were touted as fog lamps and communities competed to see who could covert first to the new fog lamps. On the West Coast San Diego touted the savings that the city could get from installing the orange halogen street lamps. There was an immediate public outcry people called in to talk show hosts saying “they didn’t want those damned cheap lamps in their neighborhood”. The lesson is where there are deep emotional issues you should develop an approach appropriate to each segment of the community. What causes some segments of the community to buy-in will cause others to reject the plan.
From EBook 1.
GUIDE TO REFORMING GOVERNMENT
-FIXING AMERICA’S BUREAUCRACIES
THE ROOT CAUSE OF MISERY,
WASTE AND VULNERABILITY
TO TERRORISM
by Lawrence Rosier http://ebooksbylrosier.blogspot.com