If FEMA is going to be gutted

And have all its powers taken away, could we just hire a boyscout to give us the color coded terrorist warnings and have done with it?:

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.

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Some allies of the Bush administration have publicly applauded the idea of handing off FEMA's long-term recovery duties to other agencies. James Carafano, a homeland security specialist at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, urged Congress to extend Landrieu's proposal by removing FEMA from a disaster zone within weeks instead of months.

"There is all kind of expertise in the government on recovery issues," Carafano said. "It's redundant to have FEMA involved in it, and a distraction from their core mission."

But some skeptics doubt the proposal would make long-term disaster recovery more efficient. Drew Sachs, a crisis management and preparedness consultant who worked for FEMA from 1991 to 1999, said that such a handoff would be disruptive and confuse disaster victims, forcing them to navigate a new set of bureaucracies.

Sachs said that he agreed that specialists from other parts of the government should be more involved in disaster recovery efforts. But, he said, someone will still need to coordinate the effort -- a job FEMA already has experience doing. And regardless of who runs an emergency housing program, he warned, there will always be problems.

We've seen when FEMA was made a cabinet level position under Clinton. We've seen what FEMA could do in an emergency and how well it could be run. Bush is doing to FEMA what he has been so good at in everything else, take a functional business or system, run it into the ground and break it, then wait for somebody else to bail him out. You can just hear the guys at the Heritage Foundation salivating over privatizing disaster and emergency assistance.

Remember what Josh Marshall said way back in 2005:

Of all the sad tales of cronyism and ineptitude emerging out of the Katrina catastrophe, probably none is more telling than the history of FEMA under the oversight and management of President Bush.

So let’s review the outlines of the story, beginning with the president’s inauguration in January 2001. Like everything in the second Bush White House, the surest clue to how the administration would proceed was to find what the Clinton White House had done and then expect the opposite.

President Clinton had appointed the first FEMA director with actual emergency-management experience, James Lee Witt. And Witt had gone on to reshape the organization into what was considered a model government agency. Clinton even gave FEMA Cabinet-level status.

Bush demoted the agency’s status and put it in the hands of his chief political fixer, Joe Allbaugh, who went about dismantling much of what Witt had built. As he told Congress in May 2001: “Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to effective state and local risk management. Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level.”

Uh huh. And we see what happens when you privatize disaster relief. Toxic trailers made by Bush cronies anyone?