FEMA: we don't budget for disasters

■"FEMA, Slow to Rescue, Now Stumbles in Aid Effort: Officials and Evacuees Tell of Frustration With Poorly Coordinated Recovery," by Jennifer Steinhauer and Eric Lipton, New York Times, 17 September 2005, p. A1.

■"Life in the Shelters: Isolated and Perilous," by Motoko Rich, New York Times, 18 September 2005, p. A18.

■"The Five Stages of Crisis-Management: After Katrina-and a hurricane of debate-a well-worn pattern emerges," op-ed by Jack Welch, Wall Street Journal, 14 September 2005, p. A20.

■"Even in Iraqi City Cited as Model, Rebuilding Efforts Are Hobbled," by Craig S. Smith, New York Times, 18 September 2005, p. A1.

Weird, but not surprising when you think of the same issue that exists with the Defense Department, but FEMA basically has no budget for dealing with disasters. As one senior FEMA official put it, it's "an agency with limited federal money that must quickly expand its operational capacity only after a major disaster strikes." Why? "It has not won a large chunk of the new federal homeland security dollars, that have been dedicated to terrorism."

In that sense, FEMA is like DoD, which also has no effective budget for real-world ops, just an open invite to beg Congress for "supplementals"

Katrina may end up helping FEMA and other domestic SysAdmin-like agencies steal back money that was taken after 9/11 and funneled so intensely in the direction of the Global War on Terrorism. Good or bad?

Largely good, I would say, because getting America up to snuff in its own self-maintaining SysAdmin function makes us far more likely to be willing to engage in such stuff overseas, presuming the White House does a better job in enlisting allies for any future rogue regime takedowns. After all, it was Bush himself in his N.O. speech that promised "the military would play a new role in federal disaster relief."

And evidence abounds that FEMA reform is desperately needed. Despite the best and most energetic intentions of the FEMA personnel on the ground, the reality is that most civilians and businesses who try to help the situation there find that it's basically impossible to get a "yes" out of the FEMA bureaucracy in anything less than several days. Apparently, no one on the ground is much empowered to do anything but send messages up the food chain.

Get the military more involved? Absolutely. If the military knows anything, it's how to empower its lowest non-commissioned officers to take the initiative in operations. In fact, it's a big calling card of our forces, where your average sergeant has more operational and tactical pull on resources in theater than most countries average one-star generals. I know it's counter-intuitive, but the U.S. military pushes down decision-making authority in operations far more than most people realize.

Sounds like FEMA needs to do the same or get out of the business. I mean, when 1,500 Floridians are still living in a "FEMA village" of mobile homes in some isolated strip along the shore more than a year after Charley hit, you have to wonder if FEMA's in the business of re-connecting or disconnecting.

According to Jack Welch, FEMA's response to Katrina was classic bad management of a disaster: denial, containment, shame-mongering, the blood-on-the-floor of heads rolling, and then actually getting around to fixing the problem. Sounds pretty apt to me.

But then you read seemingly all the same criticisms of our efforts in Iraq, some of these problems continuing unchecked to this day, and you realize: this SysAdmin thing is neither "home game" nor "away game," it's THE GAME.