|
|
|
Jewish World Review Sept. 9, 2005 / 5 Elul, 5765 Bureaucracy at work By Rich Lowry
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Among all the perils facing survivors in New Orleans after
Hurricane Katrina — drowning, starvation, toxic waters, poisonous
snakes — sexual harassment had to be far down the list. But days
after the disaster, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had
1,400 firefighters from around the country who had volunteered to
help in New Orleans sitting in a conference room in Atlanta
undergoing eight hours of training that included a sexual-harassment
class. All this before they were allowed even to go to the Gulf
Coast area to give out fliers and FEMA's phone number.
Hurricane Katrina has laid bare the peculiar perversities of the
bureaucratic mind: its utter commitment to niggling rules, its
inability to take risks, its failure to the think on the fly.
Leadership matters, and in the disaster's initial days, it was hard
to tell when FEMA head Michael Brown was doing more harm — when he
tried to do his job, or when he tried to explain on TV how he was
doing his job. But at the end of the day, FEMA is a close cousin to
your local DMV, which you would never want to trust with your life.
In so much of the Katrina response, senselessness ruled the day.
Post-9/11 regulations meant that FEMA couldn't put evacuees on
flights at the New Orleans airport without security screening and
federal air marshals on the flights. Apparently, the fear was that
terrorists had positioned themselves in New Orleans prior to Katrina
so they could pose as bedraggled evacuees, on the off chance an
opportunity would arise for them to hijack a rescue plane. Since the
power was down, the X-ray machines and metal detectors didn't work,
and it was decided that manual searches would have to suffice. Don't
forget to pat down the children!
The president of Jefferson Parish, south of New Orleans, has
complained that FEMA turned away three Wal-Mart trailer trucks with
water and kept the Coast Guard from delivering 1,000 gallons of
diesel fuel. Republican Sen. Trent Lott criticized FEMA for blocking
thousands of trailers sitting in Atlanta ready to head to the
Mississippi coast. Surely, there were carefully crafted rules and
procedures that accounted for these and other decisions to turn away
aid. The only eventuality that such rules and procedures can't be
written for is when someone should say, "to hell with all these
rules and procedures." Louisiana Rep. Bobby Jindal, a Republican,
writes: "My office became so frustrated with the bureaucracy that we
often turned to private companies. They responded more quickly and
flexibly."
Of course, the only thing Washington politicians love more than
beating up on bureaucracy is creating it. It's one of the few things
Washington can do — make new offices and hire bureaucrats to fill
them. So, after 9/11, all of Washington supported stapling together
as many agencies as possible, including FEMA, in the Department of
Homeland Security — such a sprawling bureaucratic monstrosity that
it will take a generation to make it work, if ever. But everyone
from the president on down pretended he had protected homeland
security through the mere act of naming a department after it.
Unfortunately, there is not much that can be done to make
bureaucracy less bureaucratic. It makes sense to keep as much
authority at the state and local levels as possible, since there
officials will at least be more aware of local circumstances
(although they can also be scandalously incompetent, as we've seen
in New Orleans). Political leaders must constantly ride herd on the
bureaucracy to keep it from giving in entirely to its inbred,
irrational tendencies. This is where the Bush administration really
fell down. Finally, there is no substitute for old-fashioned
individual initiative. A great hero of New Orleans is the
20-year-old who commandeered a school bus and drove evacuees all the
way to Houston, arriving before any of the official convoys. The key
to his success? He acted without bureaucratic approval.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Comment by clicking here.
© 2005 King Features Syndicate |
Columnists
Toons
Lifestyles | |||||||||||
