Thursday Editorial: The buck stops with incompetent micro-managers, not FEMA employees

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill want the agency of FEMA to be eliminated because it represents a "symbol of a bumbling bureaucracy," said a Senate panel today.

Conservative Democratic Senator from Connecticut Joseph Lieberman provided what many progressives would consider a once in a lifetime criticism of the Administration:

"For Hurricane Katrina, the president failed to provide criticalleadership when it was most needed, and that contributed to a grosslyineffective federal response."

But if that is true, why is the agency itself at fault?  If the President, Michael Chertoff, Michael Brown and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin fumbled the response, why should the burden fall on all of FEMA?  Most Americans agree that the poor response was a result of the incompetent individuals at the top, not the hard-working relief workers at FEMA that weren't given the resources to do their job.  That is like not giving our military soldiers body armor and deflecting blame away from the people at the very top.

If anything, the poor hurricane Katrina response actually proves that giving your bureaucracy proper resources, as opposed to relying on a bunch of micro-managers that don't know what they are doing, is the most effective system to get the job done.  Remember that FEMA was under the umbrella of Michael Chertoff's Department of Homeland Security.  Had FEMA been its own agency and able to directly lobby Congress for money without the oversight of Chertoff's abroad-first budgetary mentality, then maybe the rescue effort would have been more organized. 

The whole notion that dissolving FEMA is the answer to the problem is preposterous, at best.  Why should a small handful of inept, egotistical micro-managers get the pleasure of knowing that their actions caused Congress to bring down an entire agency and temporarily cost thousands of government workers their jobs?  The buck should never stop with the workers, because they don't make the bureaucratic decisions that impact millions of Americans.  But the buck should stop with the President, and result in the firing of Michael Chertoff.