Replacing FEMA with not-FEMA

Paul Krugman (The Crony Fairy New York Times 04/28/06) reports on a Congressional proposal to replace FEMA with another agency called NPRA. Other than "nep-rah" being a little harder to say than "fee-mah", the main difference would supposedly be that NPRA would be staffed with real emergency-management professionals. Krugman muses, with more than a touch of snark, "I guess it's impossible to select qualified people to run FEMA; if you try, the Crony Fairy will spirit them away and replace them with Michael Brown. But she might not know her way to N.P.R.A."

He also talks about the problems with FEMA, as described by a just-relealsed report from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs:

The report points out that the Federal Emergency Management Agency "had been operating at a more than 15 percent staff-vacancy rate for over a year before Katrina struck" - that means many of the people who knew what they were doing had left. And it adds that "FEMA's senior political appointees ... had little or no prior relevant emergency-management experience."

But the report says nothing about what caused the qualified people to leave and who appointed unqualified people to take their place. There's no hint that, say, President Bush might have had any role. So those political appointees must have been installed by the Crony Fairy.

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