Senators Propose Eliminating FEMA, Creating New Agency

After a seven-month inquiry, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs issued a report with 86 recommendations, the most drastic of which would eliminate FEMA and replaces it with a new administrative body, called the National Preparedness and Response Authority.

While some legislators have called for taking FEMA out of the Department of Homeland Security to eliminate what they consider another layer of bureaucracy, NPRA would remain part of DHS.

But the new agency’s head would have the authority to communicate directly with the president, similar to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reported The Washington Post.

Other recommended changes include some that would negate DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff’s restructuring of FEMA. In 2005, for example, Chertoff removed planning responsibilities from FEMA so the organization could focus solely on response. The Senate committee, however, recommended that the agency should once again be responsible for disaster planning.

The report does not blame any official or government agency for FEMA’s shortcomings, according to the Associated Press.

Russ Knocke, DHS press secretary, told The New York Times that the report was poorly timed.

“It is time to stop rearranging organization charts and start focusing on how governments at all levels are preparing for the fast-approaching storm season,” he said.

White House officials echoed those comments. On the same day the report was released President Bush visited New Orleans, site of the 2005 hurricane. And the president’s homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend told reporters, “As we’re headed to this hurricane season, now is not really time to really look at moving organizational boxes.”

The White House is interested in working with Congress to better organize FEMA, she said.

“I think we all share the same common goal and that is having a strong, capable FEMA,” she added.

Ranking member of the homeland security committee, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., told the AP that restructuring the nation’s emergency response can only do so much and much of the leadership needed to come from the top.

“In national catastrophes, the nation looks to the president. … In Katrina, he failed,” Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic candidate for vice president, said.