Lawmakers call for revamp of disaster agency

By Tim Ahmann

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The woeful federal response to
Hurricane Katrina shows a need to overhaul the U.S. emergency
relief agency to ensure a more effective reaction to future
disasters, two lawmakers said on Sunday.

“It is time for FEMA as we know it to go,” Democratic Sen.
Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut said on the ABC program “This
Week,” referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“It’s an emergency management administration, but it has
represented emergency mismanagement,” he said.

Rep. Tom Davis, who chaired a House of Representatives
panel that issued a scathing report last week on the federal
response to the August 29 storm, agreed a revamp was needed.

“I think FEMA has got to be reorganized,” he said on the
same program. But, unlike Lieberman, the Virginia Republican
said the agency should be pulled out of the Department of
Homeland Security.

“I think they’ve got to be … at the right arm of the
White House during any crisis,” he said, adding his voice to a
call last week from Republican Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi
to give the agency Cabinet-level status.

Lieberman, in contrast, argued that since Congress had
given the Homeland Security Department statutory authority over
both terror attacks and natural disasters, creating a
free-standing FEMA would be the wrong way to go.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who last week
was grilled by Congress over the response to the storm that
claimed 1,200 lives and destroyed about 300,000 homes, said
taking FEMA away from his department “would be a big mistake.”

“The last thing we want to do is to have a situation where
we have two parallel agencies fighting over who manages a
particular type of a disaster,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the
Press.”

Lieberman, a member of the Senate Homeland Security
Committee, charged Chertoff had “failed to do his job.”

“This is a story of a failure of leadership to prepare
before the event and then a failure to respond aggressively
when it hit,” he said.

Chertoff, who has withstood calls for his resignation, has
accepted blame for communication, planning and coordination
flaws that led him to go to bed on August 29 only to wake up
the next day to learn New Orleans was flooding.

On talk shows on Sunday, Chertoff said he planned to stay
in his post as long as he had something to contribute, but
noted that he served “at the pleasure of the president.”

“I think my responsibility is to try to fix the
department,” he told NBC.

Chertoff said he was moving quickly to replace former FEMA
chief Michael Brown, who was forced out of his job, but
acknowledged that some people who had been approached about the
post had taken themselves out of consideration.