Friendship trumps competence and experience?

[PrincessFiona]

http://business.bostonherald.com/busine ... at=&page=2

The federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows.

And before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a deputy director in 2001, GOP activist Mike Brown had no significant experience that would have qualified him for the position.

The Oklahoman got the job through an old college friend who at the time was heading up FEMA.

The agency, run by Brown since 2003, is now at the center of a growing fury over the handling of the New Orleans disaster.



``I look at FEMA and I shake my head,'' said a furious Gov. Mitt Romney yesterday, calling the response ``an embarrassment.''

President Bush, after touring the Big Easy, said he was ``not satisfied'' with the emergency response to Hurricane Katrina's devastation.

And U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch predicted there would be hearings on Capitol Hill over the mishandled operation.

Brown - formerly an estates and family lawyer - this week has has made several shocking public admissions, including interviews where he suggested FEMA was unaware of the misery and desperation of refugees stranded at the New Orleans convention center.

Before joining the Bush administration in 2001, Brown spent 11 years as the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a breeders' and horse-show organization based in Colorado.

``We do disciplinary actions, certification of (show trial) judges. We hold classes to train people to become judges and stewards. And we keep records,'' explained a spokeswoman for the IAHA commissioner's office. ``This was his full-time job . . . for 11 years,'' she added.

Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures.

``He was asked to resign,'' Bill Pennington, president of the IAHA at the time, confirmed last night.

Soon after, Brown was invited to join the administration by his old Oklahoma college roommate Joseph Allbaugh, the previous head of FEMA until he quit in 2003 to work for the president's re-election campaign. The White House last night defended Brown's appointment. A spokesman noted Brown served as FEMA deputy director and general counsel before taking the top job, and that he has now overseen the response to ``more than 164 declared disasters and emergencies,'' including last year's record-setting hurricane season.

[Auspicious]

Well I don't work for the government, but I've seen that happen at least twice in my professional life so far--someone is forced out one way or another because of clear incompetence, and the next thing we hear they've finagled themselves an even higher-paying job with more responsibility. Some people are able to build themselves really nice careers that way. On the one hand it makes you mad, and on the other hand you're just glad they're not your problem anymore.



Of course, most people who have built themselves really nice careers have done so through intelligence and hard work, I think.

Re: Friendship trumps competence and experience?

http://business.bostonherald.com/businessNews/view.bg?articleid=100857&format=&page=2

The federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows.

And before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a deputy director in 2001, GOP activist Mike Brown had no significant experience that would have qualified him for the position.

The Oklahoman got the job through an old college friend who at the time was heading up FEMA.

I heard this on NPR and am simply appalled!!!!!!! This guy should be left to the criminals with guns.
IMO - there is no excuse for the delay in aid distributed to the people in need. News crews had access, road and air access, had satellite communication. There is no excuse for thousands, including hospital staff to be completely ignored for days on end. No water, no food, nothing.
I am sick, literally SICK of hearing about well to do white boys getting high-paid, high-powered positions with no qualifications, no experience and for the most part, NO BRAINS!

[fluffhead]

Re: Friendship trumps competence and experience?

I heard this on NPR and am simply appalled!!!!!!! This guy should be left to the criminals with guns.

I agree that it's appalling, but how many of us can say that if we were offered a high paying job for which we might not be qualified, that we wouldn't think twice about it. I think the ones who are responsible for his hiring, and the ones who allowed this type of nepotism to occur in the administration, should be held accountable and prosecuted, or impeached, as the case may be.

[Cumberland]

My sister is claiming that Mike Brown went to high school with GWB. True?

[DCJenn]

Wasn't mentioned in the Post article from this morning:

Michael D. Brown has been called the accidental director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, caricatured as the failed head of an Arabian horse sporting group who was plucked from obscurity to become President Bush's point man for the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

In recent days, politicians and officials in both parties have derided Brown's qualifications to head the nation's chief disaster-response agency -- as well as the performance of the agency and its federal, state and local partners.

At a time when homeland security experts called for greater domestic focus on preparing for calamity, Brown faced years of funding cuts, personnel departures and FEMA's downgrading from an independent, Cabinet-level agency.

As recently as three weeks ago, state emergency managers urged Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and his deputy, Michael P. Jackson, to ease the department's focus on terrorism, warning that the shift away from traditional disaster management left FEMA a bureaucratic backwater less able to respond to natural events such as hurricanes and earthquakes.

The Times-Picayune, Louisiana's largest newspaper, published an open letter on Sunday to President Bush, calling for every FEMA official to be fired, "Director Michael Brown especially," joining critics in the state and Congress.

"We're angry, Mr. President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry," the editorial said. "Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That's to the government's shame. . . . No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced."

Brown's defenders say he is the scapegoat of a cataclysmic storm and failure of New Orleans's levee system that, in the words of President Bush and Chertoff, could not be foreseen.

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," Bush said Friday during a tour of the state, a day before Chertoff voiced his confidence.

"It's easy to play the blame game, find a scapegoat, but no one person could be responsible for the challenges we face and the lives lost," said W. Craig Fugate, emergency management director for Florida, where Bush's brother is governor, who worked with FEMA through four hurricanes in 2004. He said state and local authorities share responsibility for the death toll likely to emerge in coming days.

Joe M. Allbaugh -- a college friend, former Bush campaign manager and past FEMA director who hired Brown as FEMA general counsel in 2001 -- offered a qualified defense.Allbaugh called the government's overall performance "unacceptable" but added: "Blaming one agency, you cannot do that." Still, he acknowledged that FEMA had lost independence and clout with the White House. "I had a unique relationship with the president, having been his chief of staff," Allbaugh said. "If you don't have that kind of relationship, it just makes things tougher."

If anything, Brown's political background has become a liability, leading to charges that he was given his job as patronage. He got his start in politics as an Oklahoma native with Allbaugh but ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1988, winning 27 percent of the vote. He has chaired the Oklahoma Municipal Power Authority and served as a City Council member, examiner for the Oklahoma and Colorado supreme courts, and assistant city manager.

Allbaugh hired Brown after an acrimonious end to a nine-year stint as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. Former officials say he was forced out; a friend and lawyer of Brown's said he negotiated a settlement after withstanding numerous lawsuits against his enforcement of rules for judges and stewards.

Defending his qualifications, Brown said he has overseen responses to 164 presidential declared emergencies and disasters as FEMA counsel and general counsel, including the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster and the California wildfires in 2003. "I have been through a few disasters," he said at a news conference yesterday.

Reviews of the government's response to Katrina are beginning. Already, members of Congress such as Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) are pushing to move FEMA out of its department and back to Cabinet-level status. Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Susan Collins (R-Maine) and ranking Democrat Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.) have launched an investigation, and committee members will meet with department officials tomorrow.

While Chertoff said the levee breach that flooded New Orleans "exceeded the foresight of planners," Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, said Brown and other top federal officials were briefed as much as 32 hours in advance of landfall that Hurricane Katrina's storm surge was likely to overtop levees and cause catastrophic flooding.

"They knew that this one was different," Mayfield said yesterday. "I don't think Mike Brown or anyone else in FEMA could have any reason to have any problem with our calls. . . . They were told. . . . We said the levees could be topped."

Louisiana officials have blamed FEMA and Brown for bureaucratic bottlenecks, accusing FEMA of ignoring pre-storm offers of aid from Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley (D), New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D) and the American Ambulance Association.

In his last extended TV interview on CNN,Brown admitted Thursday that the federal government did not know that thousands of survivors without food or water had taken shelter at the city's convention center, despite a day of news reports.

Since then, Brown has been eclipsed by his boss, Chertoff -- who flew overnight Sunday to take charge of integrating military with civilian efforts -- and by a new deputy, U.S. Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad Allen, whom Chertoff named yesterday to take charge of federal recovery efforts in New Orleans.

Bruce P. Baughman, Alabama emergency management director, head of the National Emergency Management Association and the official in charge of FEMA's response to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks in 2001, said Katrina will leave its mark on federal disaster management. "It's time to realize, whoever is in charge of FEMA does need an emergency management background. . . . It's something you learn by experience, and a lot of that experience is gone," he said.

[DCJenn]

and here's more, from yesterday:

Right city, wrong state

FEMA accused of flying evacuees to wrong Charleston

(CNN) -- Add geography to the growing list of FEMA fumbles.

A South Carolina health official said his colleagues scrambled Tuesday when FEMA gave only a half-hour notice to prepare for the arrival of a plane carrying as many as 180 evacuees to Charleston.

But the plane, instead, landed in Charleston, West Virginia, 400 miles away.

It was not known whether arrangements have been made to care for the evacuees or transport them to the correct destination.

A call seeking comment from FEMA was not immediately returned.

"We called in all the available resources," said Dr. John Simkovich, director of public health for the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control.

"They responded within 30 minutes, which is phenomenal, to meet the needs of the citizens coming in from Louisiana," he said.

Simkovich said that the agency had described some of the evacuees as needing "some minor treatment ... possibly some major treatment."

"Unfortunately, the plane did not come in," Simkovich said. "There was a mistake in the system, coming out through FEMA, that we did not receive the aircraft this afternoon. It went to Charleston, West Virginia."

A line of buses and ambulances idled behind him at Charleston International Airport as he described what happened.

[Sheherezade]

Oh my, Jenn.....

Is the FEMA director something that gets confirmed by congress, or is it just an appointed slot?

[spotty_dog]

Is the FEMA director something that gets confirmed by congress, or is it just an appointed slot?

I think I'm gathering that before FEMA was incorporated into Homeland Security it was an appointment, but Brown is the first director (Under Secretary) to be nominated by the president and then confirmed.