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Lawmakers call for revamp of disaster agency

Posted on: Sunday, 19 February 2006, 12:18 CST

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.

Source: REUTERS

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