Uncle Sam’s Limits

We shouldn't look to Washington to meet every burden.

For the news media, it's 24/7 hurricane duty. Anchors may have returned to their television studios after being filmed as windblown warriors on the front lines, but hurricanes Katrina and Rita remain big stories, and will for months to come.

While the drama of human tragedy and recovery is most vividly portrayed on television, the serious stuff of governmental reaction is best told in the pages of newspapers and magazines. There is so much to tell, because the hurricanes, even more than the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, laid bare unmet needs that government might address.

Like 9/11, these natural disasters have again thrust what we at Government Executive consider "our story" back onto the front page. It's the continuing narrative about government's capacity and performance, the ongoing quest for budget resources, staffing, technology and organizational schemes that make sense. As time has passed, the story also has come to include the topic of partnerships, which are increasingly needed to help federal agencies achieve their missions.

All these questions are now hot topics in Congress and the nation. The federal budget, already strained to the breaking point by the huge gap between revenues and spending, is ballooning again. The Louisiana delegation to Congress is seeking $250 billion for recovery-more than the cost of the Iraq war to date. There's new talk of reorganization, perhaps to pull the Federal Emergency Management Agency back out of the Homeland Security Department or to appoint a special recovery czar to coordinate relief and reconstruction. Perhaps the biggest story is in the arena of intergovernmental relations. Partnerships between federal, state and local authorities are vital in emergencies such as hurricanes, but in September, they failed.

Beginning in 1999, Government Executive joined with Governing magazine to rate the performance of government institutions. Presciently, Governing gave New Orleans a C-, tying for the lowest grade among 35 cities. Louisiana got a B, but was criticized for poor infrastructure management. In 1999, we gave FEMA a B, just above average for the 27 agencies we evaluated over a four-year span. This was after the agency had been resuscitated by disaster expert James Lee Witt. Since then, buried in Homeland Security, FEMA has lost its focus on natural disasters and has suffered from less-than-stellar leadership.

To the extent that Washington should or could be involved in coordinating evacuation and other emergency arrangements in cities nationwide, the job would fall to the Homeland Security Department. To the extent that blame is assigned in Washington, this is where it will attach. But one conclusion that seems inescapable is that the nation cannot look to Washington for the solution to all the problems we have seen in Katrina's tragic wake. State and local governments must shoulder more of the burden.

In this issue, we begin anew to tell our story about government's capacity to meet its missions. Our staff addresses questions of federalism, public health, energy and environmental policy, contracting and more. And Chris Strohm writes an on-the-scene report about the brave exploits of federal saviors in the New Orleans floods.