Mr. Brown Tells His Story - New York Times

Mr. Brown Tells His Story - New York TimesSeptember 28, 2005
Mr. Brown Tells His Story

The Bush administration's embarrassment in bungling the Hurricane Katrina disaster was compounded yesterday as Congressional Republicans used a sham hearing to help Michael Brown, who resigned under fire as the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, pass the buck to Democratic officials in Louisiana despite the now-transparent record of federal ineptness. "A pretty darn good job," is the way Mr. Brown scored his work at FEMA as he was fed a steady stream of softball questions by Republicans. The postmortem hearing was clearly designed to shield the Bush White House from any whiff of culpability. According to Mr. Brown's self-serving tale, the heart of the mismanagement of Katrina was that officials in Baton Rouge and New Orleans were too "dysfunctional" for their part of the challenge.

The hearing, boycotted by most Democrats, who understandably feared a partisan whitewash, was the firmest evidence yet that a broad and independent inquiry on the order of the 9/11 commission is needed if the public is ever to understand what really went wrong when Katrina hit. The nation is already well aware that all three levels of government failed the victims of the storm. But the hearing was largely a careful mix of perfunctory scolding of Mr. Brown and a tight focus on state and local failures.

Questioners didn't touch on the role played by President Bush, who shocked much of the nation by exuding disconnect in the crucial first days of the disaster. Ever protective of his former patrons, Mr. Brown bordered on the comical as he recalled gravely telling the president's chief of staff as the hurricane loomed that "this is going to be a bad one."

Mr. Brown, in exculpating himself, did lay one hand on the Bush administration, when he blamed unspecified superiors at the Homeland Security Department for the gradual "emaciation" of FEMA as it was subsumed by an agency preoccupied with the threat of terrorism. Scores of millions of dollars have been quietly shuffled from the FEMA budget to other needs, leaving personnel and programs stretched, he told lawmakers. But the committee was clearly unwilling to seize on this as a symptom of the need for an independent inquiry into the government's lack of preparedness.