CNN.com - Senators: 'Bumbling' FEMA must go

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which floundered in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, should be abolished and replaced with a new organization, a Senate committee recommended Thursday.

"Our first and most important recommendation is to abolish FEMA," said Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. "FEMA is discredited, demoralized, and dysfunctional. It is beyond repair. Just tweaking the organizational chart will not solve the problem."

"Katrina has taught us all the bitter lessons of the cost of failing to build and maintain a true national emergency planning and response system," Collins said. "The first obligation of government is to protect our people. In Katrina, we failed at all levels of government to meet that fundamental obligation."

The committee report -- which also was endorsed by the top Democrat on the committee, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut -- proposes creating "a stronger, more capable structure within" the Department of Homeland Security. (Read the committee's recommendations -- PDF)

The director of the new agency would report directly to the president, Collins said.

She said the proposed organization "would be, like the Coast Guard, an independent agency within the Department of Homeland Security. This is important because this status shields the new agency from internal reorganizations that could rob the authority of its assets or powers."

Lieberman blamed the government's failure with Katrina on long-term neglect of duties by officials, lack of realization that Katrina was a catastrophe before it hit, poor decisions and absence of effective leadership.

"These failures of leadership and government cost lives and multiplied the anguish of the storm's survivors," Lieberman said.

Cool administration reception

The committee's recommendations received cool receptions from administration officials.

DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff said he saw no reason to move FEMA from under his authority.

"I'm interested here, a month before hurricane season, in not engaging in moving the boxes around on the organizational chart," he told CNN's Frank Sesno during an interview at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. "I'm interested in making sure we've got the planning finished, we've got the supplies prepared, we've got the tools built and we've got the people ready to go."

Frances Fragos Townsend, President Bush's homeland security adviser, also expressed little enthusiasm for replacing FEMA.

"I don't think it's productive to talk about dismantling the agency. ... The point of this is to strengthen the inherent response capability," she said as Bush traveled to the storm-ravaged Gulf Coast. (Full story)

First call for abolishment

Two other major reviews of Katrina relief efforts have also cited numerous problems with FEMA and made dozens of recommendations. But the Senate recommendations are the first to say the problems with FEMA are so severe the organization should be abolished.

John Copenhaver, a former FEMA regional director, said FEMA should have remained a Cabinet-level agency and not folded into DHS.

"I agree that it, to some extent, needs serious revamping but I don't believe it should be abolished," Copenhaver said. "I think that that's the wrong thing to do, and abolishing it and re-creating another agency is simply reinventing the wheel." (Full story)

Nearly eight months after Katrina unleashed catastrophic flooding in New Orleans, estimates are that more than six out of 10 New Orleans residents are still living outside the city.

Across Mississippi, almost 100,000 people are still living in nearly 37,000 travel trailers and mobile homes provided by FEMA. About 42,500 FEMA trailers are across Louisiana and 2,300 in Alabama.

In addition to the forming of the new federal emergency organization, the committee proposed a second major recommendation: creating "regional strike teams."

Collins said such strike teams "would have representatives of all the federal agencies that are involved in responding to disasters, and they would train and prepare and plan with their state and local counterparts, with nonprofit organizations, and with the private sector. We think that would result in a far more cohesive and effective emergency response team."

Brown: Reinventing the wheel

The Republican and Democratic heads of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs listed 86 recommendations in its report and held 22 hearings on the Katrina disaster. The committee called 85 witnesses, including DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff. Members reviewed 838,000 documents and interviewed former FEMA head Michael Brown.

Brown, who resigned amid criticism following Katrina, said the new agency would basically have the same mission FEMA had a year ago before its disaster planning responsibilities were taken away to focus solely on responding to calls for help, AP reported.

"It sounds like they're just re-creating the wheel and making it look like they're calling for change," Brown told AP. "If indeed that's all they're doing, they owe more than that to the American public."

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