After 5 years of Bush, FEMA has been destroyed

The Senate has been reviewing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to see what went wrong with Katrina and Rita. According to the CNN report the Senate has concluded that FEMA is beyond repair and needs to be replaced.

As Kevin Drum points out, the same FEMA which operated so well for eight years under Clinton that it was considered one of the best run agencies in the U.S. government has been so destroyed under the five years of the Bush administration that it must be replaced.

Any Organization theorist will tell you that the purpose of an organization is to route information to decision makers who use it to make decisions, allocate resources and direct the actions of others. Human beings have a limited capability to process information and determine actions, so an organization breaks decisions down to small pieces that individuals can handle, defines job functions to handle that information and then route relevant data to those decision makers.

The decision makers use the data they receive and obtain to determine what actions will be taken. They then allocate people and resources to the appropriate time and location in the stream of those actions. In short, an organization is a decision-making structure.

That decision-making structure learns how to accomplish its functions through repetition. When it makes mistakes it restructures, breaking the decision down differently and routing the data to different people. By doing so, an organization learns to adapt to the environment. Structures and job roles that work are kept and structures and job roles that don't work are rejected.

FEMA under Clinton was a smooth-running structure that worked well. Under Bush it was placed into the Department of Homeland Security and restructured so that by 2005 it was completely unable to function adequately. Bush failed, Chertoff failed, and the Republican Congress failed.

Now Senators Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman have concluded that as a result of poor leadership and inadequate funding FEMA cannot be repaired. It will have to be replaced.

Michael Brown, the fired Director of FEMA points out that the new agency will have the same mission and structure as FEMA did before Chertoff and the Department of Homeland Security took its planning responsibilities away a year ago.

It is really difficult to totally destroy a good-running organization unless you replace most of the effective, trained and experienced people with ineffective ones. Such a process eliminates the previously developed organizational experience.

To say that FEMA can't be fixed, but has to be replaced is a massive admission of failure by the Bush administration and the Republican Congress.