Katrina: The Real Blame Game

When all else fails, throw the bureaucracy under the bus. That, unfortunately, was one of the messages sent by White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend yesterday during a press briefing on the administration’s Katrina lessons learned report.

President Bush, Townsend said, “accepted responsibility for the shortcomings in the federal response.” But it was a curious sort of acceptance that mostly found fault with people far lower on the chain of command.

While other investigations have criticized administration officials for being disengaged from the response process, Townsend recommended putting even more distance between the president and federal officials on the scene of disasters. At the same time that she repeatedly bemoaned “red tape” in the Katrina response, Townsend argued that FEMA Director Michael Brown’s problem was that he was more interested in getting information directly to the White House than in following the chain of command set out in the Homeland Security organizational chart:

We know from Director Brown's testimony that [Homeland Security] Secretary [Michael] Chertoff reached out for him a number of times. It wasn't that there was bureaucracy between them, it was that he didn't -- he's testified that he didn't want to deal with the Secretary. The answer is, what we need is a system that gets the information and the needs of the people in the disaster area up to the decision-maker, who is Secretary Chertoff, who is responsible for the department. Those operations aren't run out of the White House; they never are.

Townsend acknowledged the need for “a better structure at the White House,” but only to “cut through the red tape and to referee any needless disputes that arise in the heat of an emergency”â€"in other words, to deal with the agencies that will inevitably let the president down in a crisis.

For an administration that has been so adamant about not playing the “blame game,” this looks an awful lot like an effort to make sure that the finger can be pointed at the bureaucracy when things go wrong.