Washington – The White House and Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff failed to provide decisive action when Hurricane Katrina struck, congressional investigators said Wednesday in a stinging assessment of slow federal relief efforts.
The White House had no clear chain of command in place, investigators with the Government Accountability Office said, laying much of the blame on President Bush for not designating a single official to coordinate federal decision-making for the Aug. 29 storm.
Bush has accepted responsibility for the government’s halting response, but for the most part then-FEMA Director Michael Brown, who quit days after the hurricane hit, has been the public face of the failures.
“That’s up to the president of the United States,” GAO Comptroller General David Walker told reporters after being asked whether Chertoff should have been the lead official during the emergency. “It could have been Secretary Chertoff” or someone on the White House staff, Walker added. “That’s up to the president.”
The Department of Homeland Security angrily responded to the GAO report, calling the preliminary findings a publicity stunt riddled with errors.
Homeland Security oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency and issued a national plan last year for coordinating federal disaster response with state and local agencies.
In their nine-page report, investigators noted that they had urged the Clinton White House to appoint a single disaster coordinator more than a decade ago after the destruction wrought by Hurricane Andrew. Still, they said, the Bush administration continued the failure with the lack of a clear chain of command and that led to internal confusion when Katrina struck.
The assessment – the first of several reports about the response to Katrina – noted that Chertoff authorized additional federal assistance to overwhelmed state and local resources on Aug. 30, a day after the storm hit. But Chertoff did not specifically classify the storm as a catastrophic disaster, which would have triggered a faster response.
“As a result, the federal response generally was to wait for the affected states to request assistance,” the report found.
