[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 116 (Thursday, September 15, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H8064-H8065]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                  FEMA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I have before me a speech given by James 
Lee Witt who was the director of the Federal Emergency Management 
Agency during the Clinton administration. It is actually testimony 
given on May 22, 2004. I think it is very relevant to the debate we had 
here today about what went wrong and how we are going to fix it and how 
we are going to understand what went wrong.
  Basically, Mr. Witt predicted what happened. Here is some of his 
testimony.
  Particularly on this issue of Department of Homeland Security and 
FEMA as an independent agency as the organization that responded for 8 
years to the American people's needs in a customer-serviced focused 
way, that has been destroyed. It is not there now. It is buried down in 
the bottom of a huge bureaucracy. It now has no communications within 
the agency itself, nor does it have communications with State and local 
government where, before, we had a partnership working with State and 
local governments.
  There is not even communications from FEMA headquarters in Washington 
to their 10 regional offices. FEMA employees call me constantly. They 
have got so many vacant offices within FEMA headquarters now that I 
doubt they could respond to a catastrophic event.
  This was testimony on May 22, 2004. Because, when we left in 2001, 
FEMA was ranked as one of the top agencies in the Federal Government to 
work for. Just recently in the Washington Post, it was ranked dead last 
at 28. The morale within the agency is so bad some of the senior level 
people have quit, some that have the historical knowledge and 
capabilities to respond, recover, repair, everything the agency did. 
Our Nation right now suffers on the interoperability of public safety 
communications. It is zero.
  This is James Lee Witt, May 22, 2004, talking about the state of the 
Federal Emergency Management Agency that this administration had said 
of the former director, Brownie, you're doing a great job. Of course, 
Brownie is now gone. But it is a much bigger problem than Brownie, the 
political hack appointed by the President to head this agency, which 
had been downgraded, underfunded, and basically dismissed by the Bush 
administration. It is a problem that is of tremendous magnitude.
  Today, the House voted to investigate itself. I doubt that we will 
get an honest report out of the Republican majority here.
  We offered an amendment on the floor. We said: if you put FEMA into 
this bureaucracy, you will degrade its capabilities. On a virtually 
partisan line vote, I think 10 brave Republicans voted with us, that 
amendment was rejected. I guess we were a little bit wrong. It is even 
worse and quicker than we could have thought that FEMA has been 
destroyed. It is extraordinary.
  I hear so many speeches on the floor every night. One gentleman ended 
tonight with: ``We will never forget 9/11.'' We will not forget 9/11? 
What was the most basic lesson of 9/11 that killed many first 
responders who could have survived? The fact that they did not have 
secure interoperable communications. And what has the response of this 
administration been? The President recommended zero dollars to assist 
local communities, sheriffs, police, fire, emergency personnel to 
purchase interoperable or upgrade to interoperable communications in 
his budget this year. And the appropriations moved through this House 
doing the same.

[[Page H8065]]

  Now, my colleagues will say, oh, no one could have anticipated this, 
and how could we have known, and this was a disaster of untold 
magnitude, and those local officials, they did not do their job. But it 
is actually the Congress that has to bear a lot of the responsibility 
here. It was the Congress that agreed with the politically motivated 
plan out of the White House to stick FEMA into the Homeland Security 
bureaucracy. It was the Congress that agreed with the President to cut 
the budget of FEMA, to cut the disaster teams from three to two. And we 
wonder why they could not respond and why people died unnecessarily?
  We need a fair and honest evaluation and investigation comparable to 
the 
9/11 Commission to unearth the facts around this. There are things that 
need to be done besides restoring FEMA to an independent, 
professionally led agency status with a robust budget. We are also 
entering into the greatest rebuilding effort and restoration and relief 
effort in the history of our country. We need to see that those monies 
will not be misspent; that those monies will not go to crisis 
profiteers; that they will get to the people and the communities that 
need it and the rebuilding will be done appropriately; that we will 
invest in the infrastructure that was not invested in to protect New 
Orleans.
  And it is not unique to New Orleans. I have jetties failing in the 
State of Oregon. The Corps of Engineers has no money to fix them. If 
they fail much more, it will cost 10 times as much to rebuild them. I 
have a dam that was failing in my district, and the corps had to 
scramble all around the country to find the money to begin to rebuild 
that dam. It is not their fault. Congress has not given them the funds, 
and the President has not recommended the funds to protect the American 
people from disaster.
  So we need to invest not only in a reconstructed FEMA but also in a 
more robust budget for the Corps of Engineers for prevention. And we 
need to make certain the dollars we are borrowing, because every dollar 
of this is borrowed, are spent wisely. And maybe we should reconsider 
the tax cuts for people who earn over $300,000 a year and have estates 
worth $600,000. Maybe they should contribute to the recovery effort 
too.

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