DRAFT

Senators Collins and Lieberman have called for the replacement of FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Administration). Congressman Reichert has initiated legislation to dramatically improve FEMA.  This paper is in response to their leadership in this vital area of preparedness.

PRINCIPLE

The challenges of catastrophic threats to homeland security combined with the potential inherent in a 21st century intelligent, effective, limited government require the development of a new model for response, recovery, and reconstruction after a man made or natural disaster.
    
The dramatic differences between the 19th and 20th century industrial-bureaucratic model and a 21st century intelligent, effective, limited model of government require a replacement rather than repair or reform approach to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

The number of changes are so decisive and the characteristics of success are so different that it is impossible to simply repair or reform the current bureaucracy and expect to achieve the scale of effectiveness required in the 21st century (see the paper “21st Century Entrepreneurial Public Management” at Newt.org for further explanation). 
      
Some aspects of a successful, effective Federal Emergency Response, Recovery and Reconstruction System may require significant changes in the Legislative Branch as well as the Executive Branch. It is incumbent on members of Congress to be as prepared to scrutinize and rethink their own branch as it is to insist on improvements in the Executive Branch.

VISION

The United States faces a series of manmade and natural threats of catastrophic scale. There is a potential for one or more nuclear events in one or more cities happening on the same day. There is the potential for an engineered biological attack which could provide a real time nationwide threat. There is the possibility of a coordinated conventional terrorist attack which would dwarf 9/11 in casualties and complications.

In addition to manmade threats there are significant natural threats to the American people. A natural pandemic (of which the Avian Flu is merely an example), a large earthquake in heavily populated areas, and one or more very large hurricanes (Katrina plus) would be examples of very disruptive and potentially very dangerous natural problems.

The United States has an obligation to develop a system for responding rapidly and comprehensively to such threats. Since in some cases the damage will be beyond the ability to immediately react there also has to be a system for recovery and reconstruction. (The Hart Rudman Commission outlined this requirement in March, 2001).

It is possible to use the systems and capabilities of the 21st century to develop a system of response, recovery, and reconstruction which will be vastly faster and more effective than the Federal Emergency Management Administration.

This paper outlines some of the concepts which would be inherent in such a system and suggests a framework for hearings and legislation which would lead to a dramatic improvement in American survival capabilities.

PRINCIPLES OF A 21ST CENTURY SYSTEM
OF EMERGENCY RESPONSE, RECOVERY AND RECONSTRUCTION

1. The Federal System for Response, Recovery and Reconstruction should emphasize realistic planning, organizing, training, practice, exercises, and implementation in that order. In particular there should be a plan for large scale exercises to rigorously test the capabilities prior to any crisis occurring.
2. At all levels the system should be metrics driven. Defining the capabilities we want and how they will be measured is the key system for developing very large scale organizations. A system capable of responding to natural and man made threats on the scale outlined is inherently a very large system. Precisely because much of the system will be state and local and even more of the system may be in the private sector and among citizens it is essential for the metrics to be real and the exercises to be rigorous.  One of the salient facts about the Katrina collapse was the internal dishonesty about the capabilities of the levees, the state of Louisiana emergency plan, and the city of New Orleans emergency capabilities. The intersection of these three failures when combined with the failure of the citizens in some parts of New Orleans to prepare themselves for a crisis led to dramatically greater human suffering than was necessary.  Thus there must be metrics for standards and metrics for organizing, training and exercising those standards. Part of the cost of crisis survival is a great deal of pre-crisis preparation that is rigorous and honest.
3. Transparency and accountability are keys to developing and sustaining a complex decentralized system of implementation within a centralized expectation of effectiveness. The public has every right to know if their state and local officials are running organizations capable of responding to a real emergency. The public also has the right to know if the business and charitable community are participating effectively in emergency planning and preparation. Finally, the public has a right to know what will be expected of it in an emergency and a responsibility to proactively participate in that preparation.
4. The vast majority of emergency response, recovery and reconstruction capability will be outside the federal government. In fact the vast majority will be outside all governments. The government and bureaucracy centric model of the last 70 years overstates the role of bureaucrats and understates the capabilities and power of individuals and private sector organizations (both for profit and non-profit). The federal government is only 18% of the total economy. Even that overstates its capabilities since much of that 18% is tied up in transfer payments, interest on the debt, and implementing existing programs. The mobilizable parts of the federal government are actually very tiny as a share of the total economy and society. State and local governments are not dramatically more flexible and capable (indeed they may be less so). It would be useful to analyze what percent of the resources going into response, recovery, and reconstruction after Katrina are private and what per cent are government. Despite all the focus on government the private resources are vastly larger.  Therefore planning should begin with an effort to understand how we can mobilize the entire society and use all the resources of citizens and civil society rather than merely passively waiting for bureaucracies (whether federal, state, or local) to get things done. This principle of shifting from a bureaucrat and lawyer centered system to a citizen centered system has a number of implications which will be outlined below.
5. A citizen centered system will inherently be permissive, coordinating and flexible. It will consistently seek reasons to say “yes, if” rather than “no because” when approached by volunteers. To a large degree this will be a self organizing system using information technology, expert systems, and citizen initiative, creativity and goodwill to identify and solve problems and develop opportunities at a rate faster than any industrial-bureaucratic system could possibly keep up. In some ways the design of this new system (deliberately NOT an ‘administration”) will be a cross between E-Bay, Craig’s List, and an online dating service. Those who need help will be signaling to those who have help to give and they will be mutually interacting with minimum bureaucratic interference. In developing this 21st century citizen centered model it would be useful for the Congress to call in the developers of the most successful self organizing systems to learn what the new principles are and explore how they could be applied to this new Federal system (see Glenn Reynolds An Army of Davids for further insights in this area).
6. A citizen-business-charity based system will work much better if there is a system of federal and state laws for application in a time of emergencies.  The bizarre behavior of FEMA (for example keeping a donated childcare center locked for two months while processing the paperwork) is in part a function of 70 years of growing regulatory, legal and congressional complexity. A new set of laws should be written from the ground up at the federal and state level to maximize speed, flexibility and common sense and minimize litigation, regulatory processing and bureaucratic timidity.
7. An effective system will include five layers: federal, state, local, private sector (both profit and non profit) and citizen.  The industrial-bureaucratic model we have inherited overstates the importance of the three government layers and understates the importance of the private sector and citizen layers.  Hearings should be held centered on these two foundation layers and learning from institutions and leaders in those areas to develop a new citizen-centric rather than the bureaucrat- and lawyer-centric system we currently have. Future planning, organizing, training and exercising should have all elements of the system in the room and not merely have them waiting in the anteroom while the ‘real’ powers of the bureaucracy meet in secrecy.  Involvement in implementation must begin with involvement in the planning and training phases.
8. A citizen centered system would begin with the recognition that the Immediate Responders (in Congressman Reichert’s phrase) are the citizens. They are there even before the first responders. In a large crisis they have vastly more resources than the police and the firemen.  As David Hackett Fisher analyzes brilliantly in Paul Revere’s Ride, there is a very old and powerful tradition of citizen preparedness at the heart of the American experience. A bold new effort must be made to create a 21st century citizenship in which people understand that their Creator endowed right to pursue happiness also has a corresponding responsibility to be an effective citizen. That effective citizenship has to include crisis preparedness.
9. The business community responded much faster than government during Katrina but was often blocked and inhibited from being as effective as it could have been.  The new system should maximize business involvement in planning, training and exercising and should be designed to maximize business participation. The current dismal failures in recovery in New Orleans should raise questions about new approaches to maximize private sector investment and maximize private sector job creation in the recovery and reconstruction phase. The work currently underway at BENS (Business Executives for National Security) is a good resource for the Congress to draw on in this area.
10. The foundation and religious communities should be integrated into planning for response, recovery and reconstruction. They are both integral to a healthy American society and both bring real resources and unique talent to the system.
11. When possible systems should be outsourced to dual use capabilities. There are very large logistics systems which operate everyday across America. They could be integrated into crisis response planning so they could plan to surge to the crisis area even before the problem occurs (if it is a hurricane) or as soon as a crisis is obvious in other cases.  Relying on large, sophisticated on going systems allows the government to take advantage of the continuous improvement, constant investment of capital and continuing developments in leaner and more effective management which are routine in highly competitive companies but very rare in government.  The Congress should explore the number of functionalities which could be outsourced on a dual use just in time basis and invite the potential contractors to help develop the circumstances under which they would be prepared to meet emergency response requirements.
12. There are a variety of other dual use investments which would be helpful in a crisis but also meet other continuing needs. The model for this kind of thinking is President Eisenhower’s 1955 proposal for a National defense Interstate Highway System. In order to have the capacity to evacuate cities quickly under the threat of nuclear war President Eisenhower proposed an interstate highway system which has been the primary method of middle class and trucking traffic for the last 51 years.  Its dual use status enabled it to contribute to a better peacetime quality of life while also enhancing our national security capabilities. One example of a desperately need dual use system is an electronic health record for every American.  In Katrina 1,100,000 paper health records were destroyed. People in the middle of therapy for cancer had no idea what their treatment regime was. People with Alzheimer’s were literally lost in the system. In one tragic case 34 senior citizens were abandoned in a nursing home and drowned. A major step toward surviving a future crisis is to ensure that every American has an electronic health record as rapidly as possible. Other dual use systems should be identified and put in place.
13. A 21st Century Virtual Public Health System should be created. This system would be dramatically different from the concrete building county government centered public health system of the past.  It would connect the 55,000 private pharmacies which people actually know how to get to (unlike their county public health office which they have no idea how to reach). It would include an email connectivity to every active and retired doctor, nurse, dentist, pharmacist, and veterinarian.  It would include planning for the use of long term care facilities (and in some cases dormitories in colleges and universities) in the event of a pandemic. It would integrate veterinarians’ offices into planning for response to a nuclear event since in many metropolitan areas that would be the largest number of available surgical facilities if the downtown hospitals were lost in the attack.
14. Surging resources and people should be practiced on a local, state, regional and national basis. In different kind of crises it will be necessary to move people and resources to the point of crises from areas beyond the event. To the degree this is planned, practiced and exercised before something bad happens lives will be saved and recovery will be more rapid.
15. Reconstruction is a very different problem from recovery and should be dealt with as a separate challenge with unique requirements (including massively more incentives for private sector involvement both profit and non-profit).  Congress should study the reconstruction after earlier great crises (Chicago fire of 1881, Galveston flood of 1900, San Francisco earthquake of 1906 for example).  It is very likely that the modern federal and state bureaucracies have actually made the reconstruction process longer, more expensive, and less effective. This topic deserves significant hearings and a serious consideration for the development of legislation for very large scale crises which require more than merely recovery.   
16. Systems of reconnaissance and surveillance should be used in responding to nuclear events, very large hurricanes and earthquakes, etc. A combination of satellite imagery, unmanned aerial vehicles and other capabilities should be organized and practiced for the immediate command and control requirements of large crises.
17. Since the 21st century system is dependent on communications and information flow there should be a system for the immediate establishment of wireless cell phones and wireless high speed internet in any disaster area. A combination of aerostats, unmanned vehicles with repeater systems, mobile easily installed ground based repeater systems and  other relatively low cost but high leverage systems should be stockpiled (or outsourced under contract for immediate response in a CRAF—civilian reserve air fleet-model). After 9/11 and Katrina there is no excuse for the United States ever again to have a zone of non communications or to have the wireless systems collapse during the crisis.

CONCLUSION

These principles are only a beginning of thinking through a 21st century system of response, recovery and reconstruction.  The potential exists for the United States to learn from 9/11 and Katrina and develop a dramatically more effective system for the future. The threats –both natural and manmade—are real.  We owe it to the American people to respond to those threats with an overwhelming capability which draws on the best of our entire country.