Lawmakers Weigh Cutting FEMA Duties

WASHINGTON - Lawmakers and Bush administration officials are considering stripping the Federal Emergency Management Agency of its responsibility for long-term recovery efforts following a terrorist attack or natural disaster, the latest fallout from the agency's lackluster response to the Gulf Coast hurricanes of 2005.

Under a proposal by Senator Mary Landrieu, FEMA would still run the initial response to future catastrophes - getting victims shelter, blankets, and food. But oversight of recovery efforts, which can go on for years, would become the responsibility of other federal agencies with expertise in specific areas: rebuilding housing, fixing roads, cleaning up hazardous spills, and supervising an area's economic revitalization.

"FEMA wasn't built to lead the recovery from a catastrophic disaster and it is a wholly inadequate tool for that kind of situation," said Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana. "FEMA should stabilize the situation - i.e., establish shelters and get people into them. But at some point, say 50 to 90 days after the disaster, [the Department of Housing and Urban Development] should take over housing. Why? Because they do housing."

Landrieu, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Disaster Recovery Subcommittee, has been conducting a series of hearings about problems in the recovery efforts from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the twin storms that devastated the Gulf Coast and flooded New Orleans in 2005.

Based on what she learns during those hearings, Landrieu plans to craft legislation that would require FEMA to hand off its recovery efforts to specialists in the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Labor, Transportation, and others within a few months after a disaster. All the functions would be coordinated by what she described as a new "multi-agency long-term rebuilding authority."

The Bush administration has not formally asked Congress to make such a change. Neither a FEMA spokesman nor a press officer for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, would comment on such a high-level policy matter, although the latter did note that the core mission of DHS "is not long-term housing. We are engineered for all-hazards planning, protection, and response."

Informally, however, some Homeland Security officials say they welcome Landrieu's proposal. The department, still stinging from criticism of its flat-footed first response to the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, has been beset by headaches arising from the longer-term recovery effort.

Housing for Katrina and Rita survivors has been a recurring problem - from victim complaints about battling FEMA red tape to rebuild their homes to major difficulties with the 145,000 trailers that FEMA bought for $2.7 billion after the storms. In a major embarrassment for the agency, news reports have surfaced that thousands of surplus trailers have sat unused on storage lots even though Gulf Coast storm victims are still in need.

The agency more recently has tried to sell the trailers at a significant loss to taxpayers, sparking another round of negative publicity.

"What FEMA does is [show] that it can spend an awful lot of money, and frankly waste an awful lot of money, without getting real long-term results," said Landrieu, whose state was hit hard by Hurricane Katrina. "This is not necessarily their fault. I'm not blaming them. But that's what it is."

FEMA stopped selling off the trailers last week after some were found to have been contaminated with unsafe levels of formaldehyde, making people sick. When top department officials discussed the formaldehyde problem at a daily morning meeting in late July, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told his staff that FEMA "has to get out of the trailer business," according to an official present in the conference room.