Explaining Michael Brown

Neil the Ethical Werewolf

The idea that someone like Michael Brown could possibly get a job as director of FEMA belongs in parody. We're talking about a guy who had spent a decade running horse shows before being fired for supervision failures in 2001, when Bush crony Joe Allbaugh was hired as FEMA director. Brown had never managed a natural disaster, but his experience as Allbaugh's old college roommate got him the deputy director's job. After Allbaugh left to consult for companies seeking contracts in Iraq, Brown took over the agency. When Katrina hit, Brown spent his time denying the facts about what was going on in New Orleans, in a transparent attempt to fool people into thinking the situation was under control. Now Brown's FEMA is expending lots of effort in blocking incoming aid. Even Michelle Malkin wants Brown fired.

The difference between this and the stellar performance of James Lee Witt's FEMA during the Clinton administration is like night and day. When the manager of the Des Moines Water Works called local officials shortly after midnight on July 11, 1993 to say that flooding was going to shut down the city's water supply, FEMA set up 29 water distribution points in town by that evening. While floods rendered the Water Works inoperable for two and a half weeks, the city had all the water it needed. Five hours and three minutes after the Oklahoma city bombing -- an event that occurred with no warning whatsoever -- FEMA's advance team was on the scene to assess the damage, and James Lee Witt himself had arrived within 12 hours.

Why did James Lee Witt and the disaster-relief commandos of the Clinton Administration suddenly give way to Michael Brown and the incompetents of the Bush Administration? It would seem that there would be plenty for an administration to gain in hiring effective disaster-relief people, given the political fallout that accompanies mismanaged disasters.

A look at Kevin Drum's timeline suggests one answer. The Allbaugh/Brown regime saw FEMA chopped apart and folded into the Department of Homeland Security. One of the benefits of hiring clueless but loyal hacks to head government agencies is that they won't complain when you dismember their agencies or privatize essential functions in order to satisfy your anti-government preferences. If you actually hire somebody with genuine competence in doing things that the agency is supposed to do, you might get some angry complaints and defense of turf when mission-critical functions are compromised by your agenda.

There's also a reason that lies deeper in Republican psychology. Republicans don't really want to see government succeed in doing things right. Sure, when they're running the country, they want to get the political advantages of success, if such advantages are to be had. But this desire is in tension with a desire to see government fail, to see it held up to public scorn for its incompetence and ineffectiveness. So they're not going to go all-out to hire the absolute best people, especially if their buddies just got fired from the horse show business and need new jobs.