4 Places Where the System Broke Down

(7 of 7)

4 The Secretary

Does Michael Chertoff at Homeland Security understand the job?

For all his failures, Brown has in some ways been a scapegoat for the incompetence of others. After all, as head of FEMA, Brown is just a second-tier manager in the nation's second largest Cabinet agency, the sprawling Department of Homeland Security. From the moment he declared Katrina "an incident of national significance"--a full 36 hours after landfall--the man in charge of the federal response was Brown's boss, DHS Secretary Chertoff.

A former federal judge, prosecutor and chief of the Justice Department's criminal division, Chertoff may have brought more impressive credentials to his job, but he has often seemed no less out of touch with the reality on the ground in New Orleans. On Aug. 31 he declared himself "extremely pleased" with the federal response to Katrina. In a conference call the next day with President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and five congressional leaders, when chaos and despair reigned in New Orleans, Chertoff insisted things weren't going as badly as media reports suggested, adding that he had spoken to local law-enforcement officials in the past hour. "Not that bad?" asked Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, according to congressional sources. "Turn on your TV!"

It was a reasonable suggestion since on the same day Chertoff first learned--from an NPR anchor in Washington--that there were thousands of people stranded, starving and in some cases dying in the New Orleans Convention Center, a story that had been all over the media that morning. Again, Chertoff suggested reporters were exaggerating. "If you talk to someone and you get a rumor or you get someone's anecdotal version of something," he said, "I think it's dangerous to extrapolate it to all over the place." Demonstrating the kind of tenacious dedication to a line of argument that made him a successful Mob prosecutor, Chertoff reprised the same theme last week in a briefing with House members on Capitol Hill, insisting that the federal response had been far better than advertised. In essence, he was telling politicians to believe the Administration rather than their own eyes. Some Democrats walked out of the briefing in disgust. "He's a great lawyer, very smart and extremely decent," the top aide to a G.O.P. Senator says of Chertoff. "But he's a lousy politician."

Chertoff gave up his lifetime appointment as a federal appellate judge six months ago to become the second Secretary of Homeland Security, taking charge of an agency that was created after 9/11 to protect the nation from terrorism. Chertoff lost friends in the attacks, and those close to him say he took the job because he felt a patriotic duty to protect the homeland. FEMA was just 1 of 23 agencies folded into the massive new department, with its 181,000 employees and $40 billion annual budget. DHS aides insist the department has paid as much attention to preparing for natural disasters as terrorist attacks, but its allocation of resources suggests terrorism was the agency's, and the Secretary's, paramount focus. When Chertoff was nominated, Bush called him "a key leader in the war on terror."

Chertoff inherited a two-year-old agency that was already dysfunctional-- lampooned for its color-coded terrorism warning system and maligned for its profligate spending on office parties and management bonuses. But he also inherited the National Response Plan, a 426-page report published last December that DHS heralded as "a bold step forward in bringing unity in our response to disasters and terrorist threats and attacks." Outlining detailed lines of authority in the event of calamity, the plan "ensures the seamless integration of the Federal Government when an incident exceeds local and state capability." The plan failed miserably, as even Chertoff was admitting by late last week. The problem, says Jim Carafano, a homeland security expert at the Heritage Foundation, is that DHS's plans still assume that state and local authorities will be responsible in the first 72 hours after a catastrophe. "In this case," he says, "the state and local response was wiped out. There was no one to fill the 72-hour gap."

Bush aides say that Chertoff, unlike Brown, doesn't have to worry about losing his job. "He'll gut it out," says a Bush adviser of Chertoff. "He'll definitely do better next time." --By James Carney. With reporting by Mike Allen and Sally B. Donnelly / Washington

So are there any lessons to draw from these four breakdowns in the system? The good news is that most disasters don't compare to Katrina. Even 9/11 was not in the same category since the infrastructure of New York City--bridges, tunnels and roads--remained largely intact. That said, earthquakes, nuclear attacks or, say, the demolition of a dam near an urban center would create similarly appalling levels of destruction, experts say. Now the bad news: the response would probably be worse because we would have less time to prepare.

Already, there is talk of rewiring the country's emergency apparatus. "Washington handed out $750 million to small fire departments around the country, but if the fire department is wiped out, as it appears to have been in New Orleans, what's the plan?" says Carafano at the Heritage Foundation. The tiered response, whereby state and local officials are responsible for the first few days, doesn't work in a megadisaster.

Others have suggested that the President get more power to order a mandatory evacuation or federalize troops. But eerily similar proposals were made after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and here we are again. If Andrew is any guide, it will prove more politically palatable to spend more money and appoint more experts. And that, says Clark Kent Ervin, former inspector general for the DHS, would be a huge improvement. "I am a Republican. I am not one of these people who thinks the answer to everything is more money," says Ervin. "But I do think part of the problem is that we've tried to do Homeland Security on the cheap. We spend $400 billion on the Defense Department. It's telling that we're spending literally a tenth of that on Homeland Security."

We need to start thinking of homeland security the way we think of national security, Ervin and others argue. That would mean billions more. But it also might mean a chain of command that made more sense. No one can say the military is functioning seamlessly these days, but there is, at least, someone in charge.