WASHINGTON -- The Federal Emergency Management Agency was so
fundamentally dysfunctional during Hurricane Katrina that Congress
should abolish it and create a new disaster response agency from
scratch, a draft bipartisan Senate report has concluded.
The report, to be released to key senators today and to the public next
week, makes 86 recommendations that would undo major changes made when
President Bush launched the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 and
would reverse parts of a reorganization ordered by Secretary Michael
Chertoff last summer.
The 800-plus-page report, "Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still
Unprepared," incorporates many findings by earlier House and White
House investigations but goes further in recommending structural
changes in how all levels of government -- especially the Homeland
Security Department -- respond to catastrophes.
"We have concluded that FEMA is in shambles and beyond repair, and that
it should be abolished," Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, said in a
written statement released by the Senate Homeland Security and
Governmental Affairs Committee, which held 22 hearings, interviewed
more than 320 people and reviewed more than 838,000 pages of documents.
The report by the 16-member panel formally kicks off a frenzied effort
by Congress to make fixes before the June 1 start of hurricane season.
The report faults the Bush administration, among 24 findings, for
failing to fund and coordinate disaster readiness efforts after the
Sept. 11 attacks and for emphasizing Iraq at the expense of
natural-disaster preparedness.
The administration was also faulted for bungling the response by
neglecting warnings, failing to grasp Katrina's destructiveness, doing
too little or taking the wrong steps before the Aug. 29 landfall. The
report also found design flaws in New Orleans levees and failures by
city and state leaders.
The report said making FEMA independent would "do nothing to solve the
key problems that Katrina has revealed, including a lack of resources
and weak and ineffective leadership by the president," and could lead
to wasteful duplication.
The Senate report is the only bipartisan national inquiry into the
storm, which killed 1,330 people, displaced 1 million families, swamped
80 percent of New Orleans and led to a $100 billion federal response.
House Democrats boycotted their chamber's effort, fearing a partisan
whitewash, and called for an independent panel styled after the one
that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. Afterward, several congressmen
said the report should have called for Chertoff's removal.
Wednesday, the ranking Democrat on Collins' committee, Joe Lieberman,
D-Conn., added a statement excoriating Bush and his aides for being
"surprisingly detached" before and just after the storm and for not
cooperating with Senate investigators, who he said should have
subpoenaed the White House.
As is their policy when their policies prove to be ineffective, White
House spokesman Scott McClellan reiterated the administration's stance
to keep FEMA "where it is."
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