Lawmakers Call for FEMA Restructuring

WASHINGTON —  After a week of scathing criticism of the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, members of both parties in Congress are calling for an overhaul of the federal agency responsible for disaster relief.

Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on a Senate committee that held hearings last week on the disaster, said Sunday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had become “a joke, a four-letter word” after its slow and disorganized response to August’s Gulf Coast hurricane.

“It’s time for FEMA to go,” Lieberman said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Lieberman advocated restructuring the agency but keeping it within the Department of Homeland Security, where FEMA has been housed since the department was created in 2003.

However, other lawmakers want to go further and restore FEMA’s position as an independent agency to get it more attention and funding.

Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) introduced legislation last week that would do just that, saying it would provide a more “manageable and comprehensible” process for disaster victims.

Separating FEMA from the Homeland Security Department would remove a major function from the department, whose creation had been a cornerstone of President Bush’s response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The department, which brought together the activities of 22 disparate agencies with more than 170,000 employees, was intended to centralize the government’s programs involved in fighting terrorism and responding to natural disasters.

After last week’s Senate hearings and a report from a House committee that blamed serious miscommunication between FEMA and the parent agency for a large part of the government’s post-Katrina problems, some lawmakers are beginning to wonder whether it was a mistake to fold disaster relief into such a sprawling bureaucracy.

Others argue that the biggest problem during the hurricane and its aftermath was not the structure of FEMA but its leader, Michael D. Brown, who left his post under a firestorm of criticism that he was inadequately prepared for -- and slow to respond to -- Katrina’s devastating effect.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, argued that taking the more drastic step of removing FEMA from the Homeland Security Department would be unnecessary and wasteful.

“This was a failure of leadership,” Collins said in a statement Sunday. “If you still had Michael Brown making the same bad decisions, it would not matter if FEMA were in or out of the department.”

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff also said he opposed a restructuring. Doing so, he said, would be extremely disruptive when the department was preparing for the 2006 hurricane season. “Nature doesn’t wait for us to do yet another reorganization,” Chertoff said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Still, the idea of revamping FEMA is picking up support in influential quarters. Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), chairman of the House committee that issued the critical report, endorsed the idea of making FEMA a Cabinet-level agency.

He said Sunday on “This Week” that the government’s disaster relief effort had been operating in the shadow of the department’s top priority: fighting terrorism.

“You’re competing for dollars with the same budget, and I think as a result of that, FEMA suffered and the response suffered,” Davis said.

Lieberman, though calling for big changes at FEMA, stopped short of saying disaster relief should be separated from domestic security.

“The response to a terrorist attack is not much different than a response to a natural disaster,” he said. “If terrorists had blown up the levees in New Orleans and the city had flooded, the federal government would have come right in.”