So in some ways, it’s really coming back to teamwork. Yes, it’s tough, but in other ways it forces us into some economies of working better with other partner organizations, because we now have no choice, because we can’t do it by ourselves. We cannot afford … everybody just can’t have their own command post. Everybody cannot just have their own operation center and everybody cannot just have their own systems. We have to work more together.

 

What’s FEMA’s greatest accomplishment post-Katrina?

The people.

When I got nominated [by Obama to become the FEMA administrator], I got this kind of reaction – it got annoying after a while – but I got the congratulations and condolences: “Congratulations, you got nominated; condolences, you’re going to FEMA.”

I told a lot of people, “You know I’m many things, but I cannot think of myself as a fool.”

I would not have taken the job if it was set up for failure, and I think this is the problem. People have tended to associate FEMA with failure, and then associate everybody that worked at FEMA with that failure.

I didn’t take that approach. I knew there were good people here. I knew there were good people that were joining the team, and I think the greatest success of FEMA is the people that work here.

Just like any other organization, we’ve got all kinds of folks, but I think there was too much emphasis at the time of the failure of what I saw as systemic failure of not just FEMA but the entire emergency management apparatus. Then associating people who worked here at FEMA at that time as if they were responsible for that failure, I think that was a disservice to them.

I think in many cases what we found when I got here was empowering folks and giving them a direction and then turning them loose to get there. I’ve really tried to open up the system and say, “You know, we’re going to make mistakes, we’re going to have failures. If we’re making them for the right reasons, I’ve got your back.”

If you lie, cheat, or anything else, pray HR [human resources] gets to you because if not, I will.

We [FEMA] were almost paralyzed by the risk of failure to not even making good decisions or being so overly cautious it was causing us to be too slow or not responsive.

We have not rewritten the Stafford Act since I’ve gotten here. We’ve not rewritten the CFR [Code of Federal Regulations] since I’ve gotten here. Almost everything we’ve done, people are saying well, you know, “How are you doing it differently?”

There is inherent flexibility in the statutes and the CFR. In many cases, we had self-constrained ourselves in previous responses, trying not to make mistakes, that we were slowing down the process or creating so much overhead that we were moving far away from the original intention, which is to really help communities get stabilized and get back on their feet.

To me the biggest success is the people that work here … the ones that were here before Katrina hit, who stuck it out, and who didn’t quit. That also includes the folks we’ve recently hired. You would think that with the reputation that FEMA has had that you would not get a lot of good candidates. In fact, we find we get very motivated people coming to FEMA because they want to help. They want to be part of the change. So, I think that is the greatest success of FEMA – it’s the people that work here.

This interview was first published in The Year in Homeland Security: 2011/2012 Edition.