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 Lean Teams 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 Team is pre-authorized 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 Team. The primary function of the command center is to coordinate and deliver the much needed resources to the Team 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 Team 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.

There is a new system that reduces red tape by providing instant information to government and private employees dealing with the public it is called Customer Relations Management . What is CRM? Simply put, CRM is a system — hardware, software, people and processes — that helps manage the relationship between a large, complex organization and its customers. CRM allows individual employees within a large organization to have the power — in the form of information and actions — of the organization at their fingertips. It uses Google-like databases to provide this information. See my Article 101. for more information.

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 their 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 Lean Teams 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.

For my reccomendations for reform of FEMA see: Article 109. After Four Years the FEMA Bureaucratic Disaster Continues.

Because the bureaucratic management structure is so imbedded in our way of governing few seem to realize that it has flaws that cause the public ongoing hostility due to its red tape or that it may provide an opening leading to disaster. It is important for us to realize that the bureaucratic management structure will not be reformed by current government leaders without extensive and repeated focus on major bureaucratic failures. The bureaucratic management structure is the root cause of America’s anger and anxiety over 9-11 and the hurricane Katrina disasters. The following is a list of just a few major Bureaucratic failures that have resulted from its everyday routine short comings.

1. The 9-11 plot could have been discovered if the FBI bureaucracy had allowed it’s agents to search Moussaoui’s computer when he was first arrested. A mid-level bureaucrat denied the request. This kind of decision making is a routine part of most bureaucracies and involves “second guessing” the decision of an agent in the field and is a direct result of too many layers of management.

2. The Hurricane Katrina response disaster happened as a result of a bureaucracies need for “time to develop a common mission and culture” those things were lacking when FEMA and the newly organized Homeland Security bureaucracies where combined. In newly formed bureaucracies the rules for management have not been fully developed and with nearly all decision-making being concentrated at the top of the organization the result was a complete melt down. If decision-making power had been delegated down to the lowest level of effectiveness (I have discussed this several times elsewhere) the agency could have avoided most of its decision-making problems. The implementation of an on-the-scene High Level Team which was finally done and led by Vice Admiral Thad Allen of the US Coast Guard is a necessary element of Homeland Security response management. FEMA should be organized with low level response teams (Work Improvement Teams, discussed in detail elsewhere) for quick on-the-spot decision making service to victims.

3. 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.

4. Several years ago a fired government translator of Islamic documents testified before Congress that she had been given a poor job performance rating and laid off. The reason she gave was that she had failed to follow her supervisor’s instructions to reduce the number Islamic documents she was translating and allow a backlog of documents to build up. The backlog was to be used by the supervisor to justify an increase in the number of translators. The more personnel that the supervisor had working for him the larger the salary he could justify.

This is a typical example of what I call a “turn-around” bureaucracy and how they operate. This is a common type of organization in US, State and local governments. In many cases the lack of concern for the people they serve is deplorable. In the above example the supervisor cared nothing about the fact that the entire nation was waiting for the translation of the Islamic documents to see if another 9/11 attack was imminent. If a Work Improvement Team(WIT) had been installed in the Translation Department this problem would not have occurred.

The underlying reasons for the bureaucratic disaster are in several areas. First the failure of leadership through the appointment of politically connected incompetents 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 because he has demonstrated that he is not a hands-on-responder 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”, more on this later. He 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. Its 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.

Government agencies have varying missions but can be classified into four groups by the way that their goals can be measured. The groups are, Facilitating organizations, Regulatory organizations, Service organizations, and Responding organizations. This distinction is chiefly based upon the visibility measurability of the organizations’ outputs and procedures. In this logic, the “Facilitating organization” is defined as having both measurable processes and visible understandable outputs (example: Social Security Administration). “Regulatory organizations” perform measurable processes, but they have no visible or easily measurable outputs (example: Environmental Protection Agency). The “Service organization” is characterized by having a lack of measurable processes and but have visible outputs (example: army and navy). However, the “Responding organization” has neither measurable controllable processes nor visible outputs (i.e., the Police Department, the Department of Education). The newly formed Department of Homeland Security (DOHS) can trace its mission development problems to its lack of a universal shared culture. The DOHS which has a service mission was formed from FEMA which had a different responding mission and a responding culture.
The bureaucracies culture the definition of its tasks and rules with the limitations of its capabilities influence its performance and can often produce seemingly “irrational” behavior. The main reason behind “red tape” can be explained with the fact that since there are high risks at stake when the rules are violated there is a “tendency” to multiply the rules. When public scandals occur the rules are tightened to impede future scandals and violations that consume the public trust.
Bureaucracies in addition to their main objectives make the efficiency measurement problem more complex and elusive. If goals are taken into consideration the efficiency of the public organization increases. The question of why public agencies are not given specific and well-defined goals lies with the following problem. As time passes, different interests find a place in the mission of the organization and accordingly new goals supported by legislatures need to be satisfied by the agency and are added to the “objectives” list of the agency. An example is that one of the mission’s of the FBI was to stop bank robberies now they have the primary task of defending against terrorist attacks.

The FDA has also arrogantly declared that all imported drugs no matter where they come from are not under the authority of the FDA could possibly be contaminated. They have also declared that prescription drugs purchased in Canada are illegal. This is the Bureaucracy speaking its authority has been threatened and it reacts like a spoiled child. I don’t know of anyone except the drug manufacturing companies and their lobbyists that agrees with the FDA. A large segment of the Public is ignoring the FDA’s warning and are buying their drugs from Canada. See also Reader Question 7. “The Economics of Scale in Volume Purchasing”.

Answer: I appreciate your concerns but I frankly consider your objection as a kind of lame excuse to justify your job. If there weren’t so many layers of management the personnel in the field wouldn’t have trouble knowing who to send the information too or where to get the proper authorization to do something. You’ll have to come up with something better than that. “Solving coordination problems” is one of the reasons for eliminating bureaucratic complexity. Besides being in the way mid level managers can also use their power to second-guess those closest to the problem in the field and block information flow.

The following is a dramatic example of how coordination between an FBI agent in the field and a bureaucratic executive in Washington DC caused one of the failures of the FBI to foil the 9- 11 plot.
“On August 15th after the executive specifically warned that the Boeing 747 could be used as a bomb by a terrorist pilot, FBI agents detained Moussaoui on an immigration charge and seized his laptop computer. Since Moussaoui was a French citizen, the FBI consulted the French intelligence service, which reported back that Moussaoui had radical Islamic associations, including one involved with an Algerian Muslim group that included a known Bin Laden associate. The possible association with Bin Laden should have been of interest to the FBI’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit.”

“The FBI field office in Minneapolis then sought a special warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). To get immediate attention of FBI executives in Washington DC, a FBI supervisor wrote that the warrant, and investigation, was needed to make sure Moussaoui ‘did not take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center.’ Despite this dramatic warning, FBI executives decided against forwarding the request to a FISA intelligence court because they believed it likely that the court would turn down the request.”

Answer: Bureaucracies tend to be rigidly controlled at the top of the organization. This can be offset or hidden if the quality of the top leader is an excellent manager. One who gets out of the office mingles with the people of his organization and shows a genuine interest in their concerns and follows up on them. This type of manager knows what is going on at all levels of his organization. There is name for this activity its called “Management by Walking Around”. You will find this manager mostly in small organizations where it is physically possible to get around and make contact with employees. This type of management can offset most of the drawbacks found in small bureaucratic organizations. But when the manager or the style of the top leader of this same organization is changed you can revert back to the old bureaucracy in an instant. I’ve seen it happen.

In large bureaucratic organizations that are dispersed throughout a state there may not be opportunities for otherwise excellent leaders to interface with employees. In this case the manager has to rely on his supervisors for nearly all of the information he needs to manage the organization. Over time the organization can become bloated with extra levels of management. As this occurs it also becomes less responsive to the concerns of its employees and with the progress of its mission.

Bureaucracies overtime have a tendency to become politicized. This happens because of the need to protect the organization’s budget while in competition with other organizations. The bureaucracy is highly sensitive to bad news because it may directly affect the next year’s budget. Therefore any employee who openly criticizes the organization is censured and may not be promoted. This provides the perfect environment for misuse of tax dollars and fraud. Remember the rampant credit card fraud in government bureaucracies where violators went unpunished. The reason they got away with the crime is that the organization did not want to have their budgets affected by a criminal trial or those accused may have known of even greater crimes done by others.

The main reason that a Steering and Functional Management organization gets around the above budget problems is that Work Measurement is done. When actual costs of performing the function is known the budget is known and not subject to negotiation. This negates the efforts of the organization in trying to get a budget increase without a good reason.

I recommend the implementation of Work Improvement Teams (WIT)s in both small and large bureaucracies. For this reason: by relying on the top manager or management to make nearly all decisions you are limiting the innovative decision making brain power to only a few at the top. Untold opportunities for creative innovation are lost because of the failure of the organization to use the brainpower of its entire organization. As I have stated elsewhere you want to drive the decision making power down to the lowest level practical. That means that the WIT who “owns” the problem should be empowered with the responsible for solving it but not necessarily without guidance or advice. This makes for a much more flexible organization capable of responding quickly to changing conditions and threats.

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.

Like our Coast Guard we should beef up our Boarder Guard to stop all illegal immigration. We should setup employment offices on the border for American employers who want to hire aliens legally. 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 patrolled using unmanned aircraft which can stay aloft for many hours with monitoring cameras both day and night.

We need a national identity card that is counterfeit proof that works in conjunction with your eye or by thumb print. The advantage is that your bank will know who you are and at the airports those with cards can go to the head of the line.

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 use a regular 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.

A flatter leaner organization is much more efficient than a bureaucracy.
Why have middle managers? For the most part their job is to pass down directives and give performance appraisals. They are part of the career path and the means of controlling bottom level employees, which makes a bureaucracy work. The more opportunities to promote employees the more easily controlled they are which is where a bureaucracy gets its power. No employee that is in line for promotion is going cause trouble for the bureaucracy.

I have proposed restructuring bureaucracies by eliminating one or possibly several layers of management and the implementation of Work Improvement Teams (WITs). You probably will not be able to eliminate job descriptions and performance appraisals entirely but they certainly can be simplified to the point they are practical. WITs elect their own leaders and upper management promotes the most qualified from this pool of leaders. The key is to drive decision-making responsibility down to the lowest level practical.

Answer: There are several aspects to this question which need to be addressed separately. First with a natural disaster you may have some warning when and where it might occur such as in hurricanes and volcanic eruptions. But as with some disasters earthquakes and acts of terrorism there is little or no warning. Acts of Terrorism may pose special threats to first responders as shown in the 9-11 disaster. Besides FEMA Homeland Security also coordinates the military roll of first responder including military aircraft in air sea rescue. The military also has follow up responsibility for security forces and deliverance of supplies in all disasters.

Notice that in looking at the functions that FEMA and Homeland Security perform they both have similar and possible overlapping functions as responders to disasters. So I believe that FEMA should remain under Homeland Security. Homeland security has added responsibility to deal with special threats bio, chemical, nuclear as well as bombs but both organizations respond to the needs of the public.

Now let’s examine the FEMA organization it is a classic bureaucracy although I am seeing signs of change mainly brought about by TV coverage. Bureaucratic personnel in many cases behave like robots they are programmed by senior management with sets of rigid rules, which they are to follow. When presented with a situation in which he has not been programmed the bureaucrat like the robot will ignore the situation or when pressed will have a melt down. Consider these statements “We have pre-staged food and water for this hurricane” and “Help is on the way” These are hollow robotic platitudes which only added to the Katrina disaster when the Governor of Louisiana believed them. Hundreds of people were without adequate food and water for nearly a week and they were within thirty miles of the FEMA stores yet FEMA was unable to make the connection of people’s needs and their stores.

I noted in a recent article that there was a plea from a city authority on the Mississippi coast for travel trailers for people living in tents and the shells of what is left of their homes. They had no running water or electricity and because of that FEMA would not deliver the travel trailers. The trailers were finally delivered a month late without the keys. Like robots the bureaucrats were unable to associate sleeping in a travel trailer as better than sleeping on the ground. They simply had not been programmed for it.

The Homeland Security organization other than FEMA is more military oriented than bureaucratic it has a much better record of taking care of people in a disaster situation than FEMA. The military seams to have performed well in recent emergencies especially when it took over the management of FEMA in the Katrina disaster.

You can read about my recommendations for FEMA in the following: Article 36. “Thousand Die due to Bureaucratic Bungling”. Article 37. “Restructuring Government for Quick Response”. Reader Question 11. “FEMA Appears to have Solved its Problems. Is Reform Necessary?”.

The best way to visualize the emergency management bureaucracy is to think of it as an hourglass where lots of top level pie in the sky planning for disasters takes place. This planning apparently takes place with little contact with state and local emergency planning at the bottom of the hourglass. Hurricane evacuation planning cannot be one size fits all. Besides New Orleans other special areas are Galveston and Key West.

The neck of the Hourglass represents the juncture between the state and federal authorities that can virtually kill the necessary planning between the State, federal and county governments. In the Katrina disaster arguments over jurisdiction between state and federal authorities held up relief efforts for at least a day. All this means is that there was no hurricane evacuation plan for New Orleans. The last minute decision to move people to the Super Dome was a mistake trapping thousands surrounded by flood waters without electricity, bath rooms, food and water. Others who couldn’t get out were trapped in their homes and on freeways.

Here is what should be done. All disaster planning begins by determining the threats and the needs at the local county level. There should be several plans that depend on threat level besides different kinds of disasters. For hurricanes the force level of the hurricane could determine who should be evacuated and how the emergency should be responded to.

Local needs are communicated directly to the state and to the Federal government for their resources and the completion of 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 to the state for assistance in completing 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 plan is finalized. The final step is publicizing the plan so that the public knows how they are to be evacuated. This 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.

Now lets talk about Katrina and what could have been done. First knowing that a category 5 hurricane was heading directly at New Orleans on Friday should have initiated the evacuation of the entire city because the levies were built to withstand only a category 3 hurricane. As it turned out the levies held at the category 4 level but several breaks occurred in canals within the city and it was flooded. Within a few hours cell phone communication was lost when cell phone relay tower batteries failed. All cell phone towers should have 48-hour backup and the in case of selected areas such as New Orleans they should be backed up with generators. Cell phones could have been used to bring aid to trapped families.

If there had been a plan the Governor on Friday before the disaster struck on Monday could have activated the National Guard and started the evacuation of one third of the state of Louisiana including the entire city of New Orleans. All the school buses in the state could have been commandeered and used to evacuate the city. One lane of the interstate could have been reserved for buses and emergency vehicles going into the city and three lanes going out of the city.

The plan on the Friday before the disaster would also have triggered federal government emergency authorities to start loading trucks with food and water to be sent to where the most likely areas where the hurricane will make landfall. They simply need to follow the needs as determined in each affected county’s plan. Emergency vehicles and supply trucks should arrive just as the storm passes.

Answer: It depends on what the excess budget is being spent on. Management perks are clearly waste but a new computer system that increases productivity may be a legitimate investment. You won’t know if the computer system is waste until next year when you find out if it was actually implemented. I find the attitude of your senior management about justifying budget increases, which have little to do with the actual needs of the organization, reprehensible. This is more common than you may realize.

Your organization needs a Performance Budgeting system, which is currently being implemented in many states. This system is most efficient when it is based on accurate staffing requirements obtained from work measurement.

This is a typical example of what I call a “turn-around” bureaucracy and how they operate. This is a common type of organization in US, State and local governments. In many cases the lack of concern for the people they serve is deplorable. In the above example the supervisor cared nothing about the fact that the entire nation was waiting for the translation of the Islamic documents to see if another 9/11 attack was imminent. Another more common example is when the public has to wait up to six months for a Title for an automobile.

There is a simple solution to this problem it requires a change of culture placing the emphasis on how many documents are processed rather than how many people are processing documents. The key here is in keeping good records; identifying documents processed, date received, date completed and duplicates on file. For the case of the translation of documents the records should also include the number of pages translated.

The approach in solving the staffing problem is to time-study the processing of several documents and determine a standard time at 100% rating for processing a “document” or “pages”. Next you determine the total time for an average month for processing the “documents” or “pages“ and adjust the time from the standard 100% rating to a 75% rating (adding 25% more time). You then convert minutes to hours and divide this total by the number of hours normally worked by the employees. This will give you the correct staffing level.

A weekly report should be sent to at least two levels of management. Included in the report should be the number of documents received and the number of pages received (if they vary with each document) and the number of documents or pages processed. A weekly productivity rating based on the standard at 100% should be indicated as a part of the report.

We pay a high price in maintaining bureaucracies that are mistakenly thought to be necessary. Besides the waste of the organization’s funds from added layers of supervision they extract a toll in employee job satisfaction by denying them the minimum decision making powers in the daily performance of their jobs. There is also a financial incentive; before an individual can progress in the organization he must be promoted to the next higher level of management. The more employees he has working for him the higher his salary. The result, unnecessary levels of management are created to reward individual employees for organizational loyalty. The organization becomes less tolerant of employee complaints and nearly all communication is in the form of downward directives. Upward communication is generally interpreted as a disloyal complaint. Employees who are perceived as disloyal are not promoted.

Our goal is to eliminate as many levels of management as possible thus driving down the decision-making processes to the lowest level of effectiveness. Some decisions are clearly the responsibility of a certain level of management. This is the essence of the reform process. A part of the process is the formation of “Work Improvement Teams” (They can be called by any name). These are made up of employees at the lowest level. They are empowered in making low level improvements to the work process and elect their own leaders. We borrowed this Japanese management practice and implemented it at McDonnell Douglas Missile Systems Co. When I was on Hal Yost’s staff; then President of the Company back in the 1980’s.

The approach:
First form the Work Improvement Teams one for each organizational function. They should meet at a scheduled time once a week and be moderated by a facilitator until they understand the process and elect their new leader. After a sufficient time has elapsed for the Work Improvement Teams to become successful. The bottom level of supervision is eliminated. It is interesting note how many of the former supervisors were elected as team leaders. All pay increases should be based on merit, usually based on recommendations from the team. Across the board increases should be reserved for cost of living. The second level of management should then be reviewed for its functional requirement and it too may be eliminated. Only this time Work Improvement Teams are generally not needed at this level. It is very rewarding to see employees genuinely excited about their jobs and senior management smiling over the significant savings.

I proposed this method of management to Sandy McDonnell CEO of the McDonnell Douglas Corp. soon after Hal Yost retired and it was used until the late 1990’s when the company was purchased by the Boeing Company. The company was managed by Steering teams for the top management and functional teams in the functional areas.

Up date November 25, 2009
in my Article 116. Private Industry Example of Lean Teams; you will find that the best companies in the US are managed by similar teams. See more details of the process in Article 152. The Process of Replacing Bureaucratic Management With Lean Teams

Other relevant articles:
Article 123. The Case for Long Term Implementation of Lean Teams
Article 124. The Core Features of Innovative Reforms
Article 136. The best Example of Why Work Measurement Should be used by Government
Article 137. Role of Lean Facilitator and Budget Analyst
Article 156. Getting the most out of Lean as used in Government
Article 157. Using Lean to Balance Agency work Loads
Article 160. Minnesota State Government Leads the Nation in Lean