So let’s see: After the attacks of Sept. 11, we created a new Department of Homeland Security, known as DHS.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which everyone refers to as FEMA, was folded into DHS.
Then FEMA failed abysmally during Hurricane Katrina.
Now Sens. Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman are arguing that FEMA, an agency that worked splendidly under President Clinton, should be dismantled and reborn within DHS as the National Preparedness and Response Authority.
Thus, FEMA would become NPRA. Does saying “Napra” instead of “Fema” make you feel better? Never mind that moving the once-successful FEMA into DHS may have been partly responsible for downgrading of FEMA’s mission. DHS had to worry about terrorism, so how could it take hurricanes seriously? And never mind that POTUS, i.e., the president of the United States, had appointed good and smart managers to run FEMA, the agency would have done what it was supposed to do.
Collins, a Maine Republican who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, and Lieberman of Connecticut, the committee’s ranking Democrat, are creative public servants. The agency will work better if the administration takes their 86 ideas for reform seriously – especially their section emphasizing the need for “capable and qualified leadership.” Yet there is something maddening about the Washington tendency to go for complicated, structural, bureaucratic fixes for what are essentially human failures. These can often be remedied simply by taking an agency’s mission seriously and appointing good people.
If FEMA is now a bumbling bureaucracy, why did it work so well in the 1990s? It’s perfectly clear from the appointments Bill Clinton made that he took FEMA’s work far more seriously than did President Bush. That explains the agency’s decline better than any analysis of bureaucratic flow charts.
And, should we ask whether creating a Department of Homeland Security and tossing FEMA inside it has actually made us safer? At the risk of sounding like a crotchety conservative, I’ve always wondered about the conventional wisdom that adding a Secretary of X or a Secretary of Y automatically gets problems taken more seriously.
Doesn’t the logic of the story suggest moving back to a time when FEMA actually worked? Why not just liberate FEMA from DHS and make sure that competent people run the place? An independent agency run responsibly beats innovative acronyms any time.
There was no greater foe of the “conventional wisdom,” a term he coined, than John Kenneth Galbraith, who died on Saturday at 97. May the deserved eulogies Galbraith is receiving inspire a new generation of economists to challenge their profession’s orthodoxies.
For Galbraith, economics was always about more than iron laws and indecipherable equations. He taught that one could not understand an economy without also understanding the impact of politics and power on the way it worked. In his 1987 book “Economics in Perspective: A Critical History,” Galbraith wrote that “economic ideas are always and intimately a product of their own time and place; they cannot be seen apart from the world they interpret.” Change in economics has been slow, he added, because “those who benefit from the status quo resist change, as do economists who have a vested interest in what has always been taught and believed.” Galbraith was known for being rather sure of himself, but I discovered how warm and hospitable he could be over the 35 years or so since I first became friends with two of his sons, Peter and Jamie.
Galbraith and his elegant wife Catherine treated their children’s friends with respect, affection and great wit. Galbraith will be missed as a towering social critic, but also as a very good man.
