Originally published in CQ Homeland Security. Interviewed by Daniel Fowler, “The Last Word From FEMA’s Paulison and Johnson”.
Excerpt:
Q: From your perspective, what would you say the state of preparedness is in the country today, and are we ready to successfully respond to another Hurricane Katrina?
Paulison: I think the answer is, based on where we were in 2005 . . . the country is much better prepared. A couple of reasons: One [is] how FEMA’s been working with the individual states. We did a gap analysis of all … the hurricane-prone states from Texas to Maine to give us and the states a no-kidding assessment of where they were and where they and [we] thought they would need federal help in a particular area. One state may need help with evacuations, the other may not but may need help with logistics, or may need help with planning. So we did that with all the states, and that ended up being extremely, not only useful, but [also a] very positive thing for the states to have this red, yellow, green chart of where the states were on set parameters that we had laid out.
What it’s done is helped them focus on what they felt like they needed to work on in their state, help us understand what we’re going to have to send to a particular state if they needed assistance, and then help us also focus our grant dollars on where we saw some weaknesses . . . . Planning was a weakness in almost all the states. So our [emergency management performance grant] dollars . . . they have to spend 25 percent of those dollars on planning, and that’s really helped a lot, made a big difference. I think also that based on what happened in Katrina, a lot of the emergency managers … were going back and asking themselves, ‘OK, what do I do if that was my state or if that was my city, am I ready?’ And it’s caused a renewed interest in planning. Plus, the amount of dollars that we’ve put out for exercises, for planning, for training, millions of dollars have gone out to the states. So I think we’re much better prepared as a country as a whole for dealing with disasters.
What would happen if another Katrina came along? Well, guess what? We probably had one with Hurricane Gustav. It went right through New Orleans. Now, the levees didn’t fail this time, but what if they had failed? We would not have had people in the Superdome [because] there was nobody in the city. We would not have had people standing on rooftops waiting to get picked off there by helicopters because everyone had evacuated. … The old way of doing things, waiting until after the storm goes through before we order ambulances, before we order buses to transport people out . . . not having prescripted mission assignments with other federal agencies, not having contracts in place to bring in private companies that come and do work, all of that was prior to Katrina.
What we’ve done since then is, one, change the culture of how we respond. What you saw in [hurricanes] Gustav and Ike is hundreds of ambulances on the ground, transporting patients out, thousands of buses. . . . Everyone in New Orleans who wanted to get out had an opportunity to get out. There was no excuse to stay.
There were buses, we had trains running to Memphis, we had aircraft on the ground, we had every means of transportation available there to get people out, and they took advantage of it. So, [it’s a] totally different philosophy from what you saw before and what’s happening now and how this country is responding, and quite frankly . . . I’ll have FEMA take the credit for doing that, for setting that up. Now, the states did a lot of the work, which they should have been doing. But, the fact is, we put this thing in play to make it work.
Q: So, it seems that you think the country is ready to respond to another Hurricane Katrina?
Paulison: I do. Is it going to stop the damage from happening? No. Will levees still break? Yes. Will houses still get destroyed? Yes. Are we in a place to make sure there are shelters in place? Are we in a position to make sure that evacuations are capable of taking care of people and getting them out of town if they want to get out? Are we in a position to make sure we have the right amount of assistance on the ground prior to the storm, like ambulances and buses and urban search and rescue teams? Are we as a federal agency much better coordinated than we were prior to Katrina? The answer is yes, with the National Response Framework, National Incident Management System. None of those things were in place prior to Katrina. One federal agency wasn’t talking to another, and now it’s a coordinated, unified command-type structure that’s responding, [which] wasn’t there before. So, the answer [is] yes, I’m comfortable that we can handle another Katrina.
Johnson: I think you’ve seen investments in the states as well. Louisiana has invested in shelter space and equipment, North Carolina built a warehouse and shared it with South Carolina, And Alabama, the governor put emergency generators in all the . . . junior college dorms, and then we used them to evacuate Louisiana residents.
Paulison: And move them to Alabama into those community colleges that the state of Alabama is now using it for sheltering, all up and down the state.
Johnson: We designed a multinodal transportation system out of Louisiana, and [it] actually worked this past summer, taking evacuees out by air, by rail, by bus.
Paulison: We’re sharing a huge logistics warehouse in Orlando with the state of Florida, and now they’re building another one in the south end of Florida on the Homestead Air Force Base. So a lot of this stuff is going on that simply didn’t happen before.
Johnson: I think when you have a Gustav en route to Louisiana and on the same stage is Dave Paulison, [Louisiana] Gov. [Bobby] Jindal, [New Orleans] Mayor [Ray] Nagin, the parish presidents, all on the same stage, evoking the same message, and the end result is that new Orleans is a ghost town before Gustav arrives, [this shows that] the focus is on federal, but if federal, state and local are working together, we can accommodate a Katrina, and that’s what you saw play out this summer.
Q: If you could point to one thing during your tenure that you are most proud of, what would it be?
Paulison: Boy, everybody asks me that, and there’s three or four things that pop up. . . . Harvey’s got a little bit [of a] different perspective than I do, and I’ll tell you what mine is and then he can share his with you. … When I took over FEMA, there was a significant lack of experienced leadership in the organization. … We have 10 regions out there, eight of them were empty as far as regional directors, and the same thing with headquarters; none of those senior slots, political slots, were filled. Here at headquarters, on this floor, the people that were managing FEMA at the time had very little management experience and no emergency management experience.
So what I started doing was reaching out to that first-responder, emergency management community out there and asking people who had 25 and 30 years’ experience dealing with disasters to come and work for FEMA. And . . . for the first time in FEMA’s history, I got all 10 regions filled. … And I did the same thing here at headquarters, whether it’s [in] response, or recovery, or logistics management, or [the] management team, bringing in people who have years of experience managing and dealing with disasters. That did a couple things. One, it sent a clear message to our employees that I was serious about rebuilding this organization. They didn’t see me bringing people in just because of their connections with the administration or anything else. I was bringing people in that they knew … are out there, and they saw me bringing the experts in to manage. I think what we’ve done is, we’ve set that bar so high that it’d be very difficult for anybody else to come in here and start going back to the old way. I think that is a significant legacy.
The other [thing] is the culture change we talked about, of how we’re going to respond as a country to disasters. And I hate to go back to the old … [system] of sequential failure: waiting for the local community to become overwhelmed before the state steps in, and waiting for the state to become overwhelmed before the federal government steps in. We saw in Katrina that doesn’t work, it’s too late if you operate that way. You’ve got to go in ahead of time, you’ve got to go in as partners standing side by [side], and take a team approach, local, state, federal responding together. … And that was not an easy sell.
The first place I tried it was actually in [Hurricane] Wilma, and I got a lot of push-back from my state [Florida] because their perception was, just based on what they saw I was doing, that this was a knee-jerk reaction from Katrina, and the feds are going to come in and take over. And the states, particularly Florida and other well-prepared [states], they don’t want that. They’ve got a lot of pride, and it took me a while to convince them that I’m not going to come in and take over.
I was a local fire chief; I didn’t want the feds coming in and taking it. They tried to do it in the ValuJet crash, and I told them to go pound sand, this is my scene. . . . So once they got that, then it caught on, and now everybody across the country expects that that’s the way we’re going to operate, that we’re going to operate as team. Yes, the feds are going to be here early, and they’re going to be here right along our side, but they’re not taking over. I think if I had to point to two things … those would be the two that I think are going to be a legacy that … [will not] go away with whoever is managing FEMA.
Johnson: … The third [thing] that I [would] mention is … the core business approach and business systems inside FEMA. What was happening before is that FEMA was not an organization that learned lessons; FEMA tended to repeat the same mistake over and over again, and it was [because of] a lack of doctrine and a lack of solid core business functions, [in such areas as] procurement, HR [human resources], budget, IT [information technology]. … When people judge FEMA, they judge us on what they see at a disaster, but the agency is planted on a bad foundation. And what we’ve done behind the scenes is, we strengthened the foundation of FEMA in terms of all the core business processes. For example, this past summer there were no stories about money wasted in Gustav and Ike, there were no stories about non-competitive contracts in Gustav and Ike, there were no stories out there [on] not being able to provide equipment, and money, and support to states. Those business processes were there. We’ve worked very hard to build that, and we have doctrine now that describes how our [Incident Management Assistance Teams] work, and doctrine on how we hold our sessions in the [video teleconference]. . . . We had a team down in Austin [recently, and] we’re writing doctrine on how do we do a housing mission, not to repeat the mistakes we made this summer in east Texas. And I think ingrained in the culture of FEMA now is, how do we learn lessons and educate and train our people to be a stronger agency. . . . I think we housed a whole arm of GAO [Government Accountability Office] on a family of audits because we made so many mistakes in business processes, and that’s not going to happen out of Gustav and Ike. So, I think … it’s the silent foundation that we built that I think that will serve FEMA for a long time to come.
The fourth thing is just the breadth of FEMA. We’re using grant dollars now. Gap analysis identifies a gap, $3.2 billion bucks in grants, [and] now, we write into the grant guidance where that money should go to more specifically strengthen gaps in capability. … [FEMA] actually can document, now, a better return on investment for grant dollars than we could ever do before. You don’t see those [things] about FEMA as much; it’s not response and recovery, but it’s what really undergirds the organization.
Q: What are the one or two biggest challenges FEMA faces?
Paulison: Catastrophic housing. … It’s a national issue, it’s not just a FEMA issue, because FEMA can’t resolve it by itself. We just had a summit down in Miami, the state of Florida put on a catastrophic housing summit using the 1926 [Great Miami] Hurricane as model. If we had a 1926-type hurricane, taking the same path across Florida [through] Miami-Dade County, Broward, Palm Beach, Lake Okeechobee, with the Herbert Hoover Dike … how do we deal, with a number of potentially uninhabitable homes, maybe 100,000 that could get destroyed with a hurricane like that? So with our strategic housing plan [released last Friday] … with the annexes … that will set the course for how the next administration really needs to deal with the catastrophic housing piece. So, that’s not done, and that’s a big issue for the next administration to continue working on that we started that process.
I think we’ve got all the parts there, [but] again, it’s much, much bigger than FEMA. FEMA handles a small piece of it up front, but then there’s a much, much larger piece that’s got to involve HUD [the Department of Housing and Urban Development] and HHS [Health and Human Services Department] and maybe VA [Veterans Administration] and the local [authorities] and the states. …
Q: If you could give your successor any advice, what it be?
Paulison: My advice would be to start filling immediately those senior-level political positions that just are being vacated on [Jan. 20] with the same types of people that I brought in, people with 25, 30 years’ experience dealing with disasters, people that have good management skills, and fill those very quickly. I think that that’s No. 1.
I think No. 2 is [to] continue with the philosophy that we’re using now on how this country is going to respond to disasters, making sure that we continue that leaning forward, getting out ahead of the disaster instead of getting behind it [and] trying to play catch up, like happened in Katrina. I think those are the two biggies.
Another one would be something Harvey talked about earlier, [to] learn and understand what the breadth of FEMA is. FEMA is no longer just a check-writing agency, sitting back waiting for somebody to ask for a couple of dollars to help them rebuild something. It’s much, much larger than that.
Johnson: More than response and recovery, there’s a huge strength in preparedness and grants, and, we’ve made huge inroads. The chief, for example, [last week] signed off on … comprehensive planning guidance 101, which guides how state and locals plan, and the president signed off on IPS, the Integrated Planning System, which is how the federal government now plans. When you look at those two documents, the outline, table of contents, is exactly the same. … Chapter 4, which describes planning, is verbatim, the same chapter in state and local planning and federal planning. We’ve never had that before.
The states have agreed to require themselves to use common terms of reference and a common format so that now you really can take a plan in Alabama and integrate it with a plan from Georgia. It’s not like they don’t mesh anymore. … We’re on the cusp of a planning system now that we’ve never seen, and, I mentioned that we have grants and we’re beginning to steer where those grants dollars go. That’s a huge breadth of FEMA beyond response and recovery, so use that whole breadth of FEMA.
The fourth thing to add … is to recognize and engage the environment that we live in, don’t stand back and be reactive and take shots. We can use FEMA as a platform to engage Congress, the media, the public, state and locals, private sector, and advance the cause of emergency management preparedness. . . . I really recommend to get out and begin to shape expectations. We have a huge problem at FEMA chasing expectations, and I think we’ve begun to shape those, and I think the new administrator and his or her team need to be very aware of that right up front.
Q: What mistakes have you made?
Paulison: I don’t know that I would call them mistakes. Have we had to back up and re-track and do things? Yeah, I think the answer is yes. … Was it a mistake to buy 140,000 travel trailers with formaldehyde in them, had we known that they had formaldehyde and that was the big issue? Yeah, that was a mistake. But the truth is, we bought those things in good faith, just like every other American consumer does, and we’ve been using them for 20 years. So, I don’t know if you call that a mistake. Did we have to go back and take another track after we figured that out? Yeah, the answer’s yes. And, guess what? Now … the manufacturers are telling us they can now build travel travelers at a low formaldehyde, so now we’re out on the street to buy those. We didn’t have them for last hurricane season, but now we’ll have them for next hurricane season.
Johnson: I think really the better question, if I can suggest that to you . . . is what have we really learned? . . . We’ve really learned better to engage state and local interests before we do some things, and I credit a lot of that to Dennis [Schrader, FEMA’s deputy administrator of national preparedness, whose last day on the job was Wednesday] and some of his staff. … I think if you go out to NEMA [the National Emergency Management Association], IAEM [the International Association of Emergency Managers], other entities, I think they will tell you that they appreciate that FEMA seems to be listening better. [The] National Advisory Council that was created with [post-Katrina legislation to overhaul emergency management (PL 109-295)], [Chairman] Kem Bennett [has] done a masterful job. . . . So I think you’d have to say that FEMA’s learned to listen better than we did.
Paulison: IAEM gave me their highest award they ever give out, and they only give it out when they feel like it’s deserved — they don’t give one out every year. . . . I involve them in what we’re doing and they haven’t been involved in FEMA much before. FEMA’s mainly focused on the NEMA, which is the national emergency managers, the state emergency mangers, and I’m from the local community, and I felt like the local emergency managers should be more involved in what FEMA does, because that’s really where the rubber meets the road. And so I started involving them heavily in our decision-making process, working with us on grants and other things, and they’ve responded to that.
Q: Do you have any regrets with regard to your tenure?
Paulison: I really don’t. It was the right thing to do to take the job. It was the right thing to do to rebuild this organization. I can’t think of another federal agency that has a more pure mission than FEMA. . . . Helping people, it’s all we do. So if we had some ugly times, yes, but I’m not sorry I took the job. In fact, I’m very proud to have worked with these people here.
Q: Do you have any regrets, Admiral Johnson?
Johnson: No. I wish I had a little bit more time. FEMA’s on the right road, it really is. You can see almost weekly measurable changes in FEMA, and, I think that it’s not fixed yet. … So everybody who starts on a project like this would like to see it to its conclusion. But really I think Dave’s exactly right. I think pride is really the word. No regrets. I think we’ve learned, we’ve made good decisions. As an operator, you make the best decision with the best information you have, and when new information comes in, you make another decision. I think we’ve been operators, not bureaucrats. …
Paulison: This is really almost like a relay race. We’ve run the race, and I feel like [it was] the best race we could’ve run, and now we’re handing the baton to somebody else, and they’ve got to pick it up and run. We took over an organization [at a time when it] was questionable whether it was going to survive, based on what happened with Katrina. And the fact [is] we brought it this far, and not only did it survive, it’s thriving right now. . . . [We’ve] doubled the size of the organization, doubled the budget, expanded our mission [to something] much larger than what I think the original writers of the Stafford Act (PL 100-707) ever thought FEMA would be. . . . The race isn’t won, but we’ve run a good race in the first quarter. Now it’s time [for] someone to take it up and run the next quarter-mile.
Q: Administrator Paulison, you recently spoke at Homeland Security Policy Institute forum at George Washington University, where you said FEMA should remain in DHS; but you also noted there are arguments on both sides of the reorganization question. From your perspective, what is the main reason FEMA should remain in DHS, and do you see any benefit to taking it out?
Paulison: The reason I see it staying in DHS is because of the resources that are available to it [there]. You heard the example I gave of using screeners in Houston, when we had to do the [supply distribution sites] that we had not anticipated doing [during Hurricane Ike].
Transportation Security Administration chief Kip Hawley gave us 300 screeners on a phone call, and they showed up within a few hours to help us set up those [supply distribution sites]. And, those guys were excited about doing it, I mean, they really got into it. Using the Predator from [Customs and Border Protection Commissioner] Ralph Basham in border patrol, having a personal relationship with the commandant of the Coast Guard to get those assets anytime we need them, there’s a tremendous amount of benefit for staying inside the organization.
I think the people who are talking about pulling FEMA outside of Homeland Security haven’t experienced it inside Homeland Security. They keep using arguments [that] really aren’t problems. Why don’t you have direct access to the president? Well, guess what? The president calls me at home while I’m eating Cheerios in the morning, 6 o’clock in the morning I get a phone call, it’s the president of the United States on the line, “Dave, what’s going on?” Who flies with him on Air Force One when he goes to disasters? It’s me. Who briefs the cabinet and the president on disasters? It’s me. So I don’t have that problem of having access to the president, and I’m not even the same party. It’s the president’s relationship with the FEMA administrator that’s important, and that’s happened, so why would you take it out? You take it out and you’re going to have that same access that I already have, so you haven’t accomplished anything, and you set up a, I don’t want to say conflict, because that’s not the right word … but the secretary has a lot of authority under Homeland Security Presidential Directive 5 that flows into what FEMA does. So if you pull FEMA out, how are we going to adjudicate who does what? Is DHS now going to set up a mini-FEMA because they have to do that same type of thing? Are we going to be fighting over resources? I see nothing but major problems if FEMA’s pulled, out as far as FEMA’s mission and what it should be doing based on what the Stafford Act tells it to, and based on the Post-Katrina Emergency Reform Act.
Q: We talked a little bit about the advice that you might give to your successor. Would you talk about what qualities you think the next administrator should have?
Paulison: First of all, they’ve got to have a rock-solid emergency management/first responder background. They need to have almost instant credibility with that emergency-management community out there. They need strong management skills, strong people skills, and they need somebody that has vision, that can see what this organization can be, not what it is today.
Johnson: I think the administrator’s got to be a very articulate person as well. The administrator of FEMA is a player, and people listen, and he or she has to be able to articulate a vision of where we’re going, how we’re going to get there, in a way that the common person can understand. I think that’s been Dave’s magic, to link in across all people and connect and communicate, that’s why he’s been so effective. And I think past administrators have had the same kind of skill, some of them that have been successful have had that same kind of skill, very important.
Q: What are you going to do next?
Paulison: My wife keeps asking the same thing. I really haven’t focused on it, quite honestly, and, I purposely haven’t focused on it. . . . I guess most people think, ‘gee, the last couple of months are going to be coasting,’ and it’s been pretty intense. And I purposely didn’t want to have me out there looking for a job while we’re trying to manage here, so I’m going to wait until I’m gone, and then I’ll start focusing on what I want to do. My home is in South Florida . . . in the city of Davie, so we’ll . . . be packing up to move back there, and my wife’s already back there. . . . That’s my home.
Q: Do you anticipate ever returning to government?
Paulison: I’ve been in government 37 years. I think I’d like to try something else. . . . I don’t know, maybe I’ll be a reporter. I can ask the questions. Somebody asked me the other day if I was going to run for Senate in Florida since [Republican Sen.] Mel Martinez is stepping down. I say, “Yeah, as soon as I can find $3 million to run.”
Johnson: I think my near-term goal is to have dinner with my wife on a weeknight, which hasn’t happened in longer than I can remember. But, like Dave, I think both of us have been so focused on our job, we’re going to take a little bit of a breather and see what we want to do. . . . I think I’d like to work in private sector, understand what that’s about. But I wouldn’t mind coming back into government at some point. I think government service, public service, is a noble endeavor. We’ve been able to make America really safer in a lot of regards, and there’s a lot to be said for that at the end of the day.”
