The morale among FEMA employees was as bad as the agency’s performance. Having grown from a complicated background, the agency struggled to cope with an uncertain mission. FEMA’s predecessors, including parts of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation during the Roosevelt administration and the Federal Disaster Assistance Administration during the 1960s and 1970s, had for decades worked to provide disaster relief. Then, during the Cold War, it became responsible for planning to help the nation recover in case of nuclear attack. The agency became FEMA in 1979, but its very different responsibilities never did fit neatly together. It had the tough job of acting like a local fire department--it needed to be ready to respond instantly to a wide range of disasters, wherever they might occur. But unlike most local fire departments, it found itself chronically underfinanced. It was an independent agency without a cabinet-department home. No one wanted to spend much money on the agency in advance of disasters, but when natural disasters occurred, everyone expected instant response. Instead of seeing FEMA simply as an agency that wrote checks and rolled out cots, with different units organized by programs, the new director restructured the agency around a theme of mission. For example, he combined all the disaster assistance and relief programs into a single response-and-recovery directorate and created a “mitigation directorate” to coordinate the agency’s prevention activities. He consolidated forty-five different operating accounts into just eight, abolished two branches of the agency, and flattened the organization by eliminating two layers of management. Witt focused FEMA on partnerships. He told his employees that FEMA could not attack disasters on its own--that he saw the agency’s job as less that of providing aid than of ensuring that aid reached needy citizens. That redefined role meant building stronger ties with state and local governments in advance of problems, and giving them more flexibility in attacking hazards. FEMA slashed its regulations from more than 300 pages to less than 50 pages and cut reporting requirements for its programs by more than half. Witt’s vision of partnerships extended to the private sector. For example, FEMA began working with builders along coastal communities to install “hurricane tie-downs” in the roofs of new houses. FEMA researchers had discovered that it was far cheaper to add extra metal straps during construction than to replace a roof that had blown off in a storm--and then repair the inside of the storm-damaged house. The keystone of Witt’s strategy was what he called “customer service.” As he explained, “We learned to see disasters through the eyes of our customers, Americans who had lost loved ones, their homes, their business, and their children’s toys.” With that in mind, “we adapted, we changed.” He equipped FEMA’s emergency response staff with computers to speed up the processing of forms and installed 1-800 numbers so that disaster victims wouldn’t have to wait in long, Hurricane Andrew–style lines. These changes slashed waiting time for aid from 30–45 days to just 5–10 days—and they cut FEMA’s cost to process a disaster application from $59 to just $14. The reorganization and restructuring, together with the investments in new technology, helped FEMA respond better. Still, Witt concluded, “The unchanging truth about changing government or any institution is that it begins and ends with the employees. Change won’t happen without them.” Like everything else in government, 9/11 profoundly changed FEMA. As part of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA was moved, along with twenty-one other agencies, into the new department. The rationale: as the federal government’s lead agency in preparing and responding for natural disasters, it needed to coordinate its work with the other agencies that shared the homeland security mission. Some analysts worried how the restructuring would affect FEMA’s ability to respond, although, as Kate Hale and Betty Babtizke testified, it did just fine in an early test of emergency relief coordination. But with its employees facing tough competition for resources inside a large, new department—and with its mission fundamentally refocused on homeland security—the analysts wondered if FEMA would be able to sustain the progress Witt had launched. In Septmeber 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, they found out. Witt’s FEMA had become a shambles and the agency stumbled badly in responding to the storm’s challenges. Witt had a vision of partnership with state and local governments, as well as with private-sector companies. How does this approach square with the models of hierarchy that, as we saw in chapter 3, dominate the theories and practice of public administration?
The morale among FEMA employees was as bad as the agency’s performance. Having grown from a complicated background, the agency struggled to cope with an uncertain mission. FEMA’s predecessors, including parts of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation during the Roosevelt administration and the Federal Disaster Assistance Administration during the 1960s and 1970s, had for decades worked to provide disaster relief. Then, during the Cold War, it became responsible for planning to help the nation recover in case of nuclear attack. The agency became FEMA in 1979, but its very different responsibilities never did fit neatly together. It had the tough job of acting like a local fire department--it needed to be ready to respond instantly to a wide range of disasters, wherever they might occur. But unlike most local fire departments, it found itself chronically underfinanced. It was an independent agency without a cabinet-department home. No one wanted to spend much money on the agency in advance of disasters, but when natural disasters occurred, everyone expected instant response.
Instead of seeing FEMA simply as an agency that wrote checks and rolled out cots, with different units organized by programs, the new director restructured the agency around a theme of mission. For example, he combined all the disaster assistance and relief programs into a single response-and-recovery directorate and created a “mitigation directorate” to coordinate the agency’s prevention activities. He consolidated forty-five different operating accounts into just eight, abolished two branches of the agency, and flattened the organization by eliminating two layers of management.
Witt focused FEMA on partnerships. He told his employees that FEMA could not attack disasters on its own--that he saw the agency’s job as less that of providing aid than of ensuring that aid reached needy citizens. That redefined role meant building stronger ties with state and local governments in advance of problems, and giving them more flexibility in attacking hazards. FEMA slashed its regulations from more than 300 pages to less than 50 pages and cut reporting requirements for its programs by more than half.
Witt’s vision of partnerships extended to the private sector. For example, FEMA began working with builders along coastal communities to install “hurricane tie-downs” in the roofs of new houses. FEMA researchers had discovered that it was far cheaper to add extra metal straps during construction than to replace a roof that had blown off in a storm--and then repair the inside of the storm-damaged house.
The keystone of Witt’s strategy was what he called “customer service.” As he explained, “We learned to see disasters through the eyes of our customers, Americans who had lost loved ones, their homes, their business, and their children’s toys.” With that in mind, “we adapted, we changed.” He equipped FEMA’s emergency response staff with computers to speed up the processing of forms and installed 1-800 numbers so that disaster victims wouldn’t have to wait in long, Hurricane Andrew–style lines. These changes slashed waiting time for aid from 30–45 days to just 5–10 days—and they cut FEMA’s cost to process a disaster application from $59 to just $14.
The reorganization and restructuring, together with the investments in new technology, helped FEMA respond better. Still, Witt concluded, “The unchanging truth about changing government or any institution is that it begins and ends with the employees. Change won’t happen without them.”
Like everything else in government, 9/11 profoundly changed FEMA. As part of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA was moved, along with twenty-one other agencies, into the new department. The rationale: as the federal government’s lead agency in preparing and responding for natural disasters, it needed to coordinate its work with the other agencies that shared the homeland security mission.
Some analysts worried how the restructuring would affect FEMA’s ability to respond, although, as Kate Hale and Betty Babtizke testified, it did just fine in an early test of emergency relief coordination. But with its employees facing tough competition for resources inside a large, new department—and with its mission fundamentally refocused on homeland security—the analysts wondered if FEMA would be able to sustain the progress Witt had launched.
In Septmeber 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, they found out. Witt’s FEMA had become a shambles and the agency stumbled badly in responding to the storm’s challenges.
Witt had a vision of
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