“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”
That was George W. Bush’s high praise for the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Michael Brown, for its response to Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing deluge of New Orleans in September 2005. No-one else, alas, shared the sentiment: within days, Brown — whom Bush had appointed — would be sidelined from the Katrina response by his boss, the head of the Department of Homeland Security. Ten days later, Brown, a lawyer on the fringes of Republican politics who’d lucked into a job in the expanding Bush counterterrorism apparatus and who had minimal experience in emergency management, quit FEMA.
The 1,392 lives lost in the deluge — principally due to a failed state and federal government response — were grim testament to what happens when someone without experience is put into a key position during an emergency. But later, a more complicated story would emerge of Brown as not merely a poor leader but a failed turf warrior who had been unable to protect FEMA from budget cuts as resources were shifted to the post-9/11 counterterrorism focus in the newly created Department of Homeland Security.
Donald Trump hasn’t nominated a head of FEMA yet — its current head is a veteran emergency administrator — but his pick to run Homeland Security is South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, whose entire focus will be border control. With Trump promising to use troops to help round up undocumented immigrants for deportation, what are the chances that the mistakes of the Bush years will be replayed, only this time with border control, not terrorism, the idée fixe of Homeland Security.
That is, until another major hurricane arrives and exposes the failings of another FEMA head… who is then scapegoated by a desperate administration.
The perils of appointing people not merely clearly unsuited to cabinet roles — an anti-vaxxer as health secretary; an alleged child sex trafficker as attorney-general — but wholly lacking in the kind of experience needed to run large organisations continue to be a blinking red warning light on Donald Trump’s proposed appointments. The latest is Trump’s proposal to appoint Kash Patel as head of the FBI.
Patel, a lawyer and political staffer before becoming a full-time Trump cheerleader, has zero law enforcement or executive experience, but strong views on the FBI: it’s part of the deep state conspiracy against Trump and must have its Washington headquarters shut down (who knew that voting against “Defund the Police” would lead to, well, defunding the police?).
Patel has also promised that the new Trump administration would “come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections… We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly — we’ll figure that out.” That’s the person now in charge of one of the world’s largest domestic security services. But please, don’t dare call them fascists. And in any event, “press freedom” is just one of those ridiculous beliefs of out-of-touch elites.
Problematically there’s a head of the FBI there already — one appointed by Trump in 2017 (you do have to admire the genius of the deep state — managing to convince Trump himself to appoint someone who would implement its agenda). Christopher Wray’s appointment doesn’t end until 2027, but he’s expected to be fired.
While Patel will be directing the FBI to go after journalists who reported that Biden won the 2020 election — no need to bother at Fox, Kash — the FBI’s day job of investigating terrorism, foreign espionage, organised crime, corruption, civil rights abuses and drug trafficking will receive lower priority (assuming FBI resources are not redeployed to the war on undocumented migrants). At least, until a terrorist attack happens that the FBI received warnings of but failed to do anything about; then it will be time for scapegoats.
This grim reality of large government organisations, one not understood by the Elon Musks and Gina Rineharts of the world, is that delivering goods or services (health; infrastructure; security; emergency management; education) on a state or country-sized scale to the satisfaction of those being served is complex, demanding and rarely achieved consistently even by skilled, experienced professional administrators. Insert people who aren’t skilled and experienced and the system might continue to deliver if they’re backed by enough more junior experts. But in a crisis or emergency, which places stress on bureaucratic systems that ends up accumulating at the weakest link, the systems start to malfunction. Insert people actively hostile to the organisation’s goals, or bent on pursuing others, and it doesn’t take a crisis to create dysfunction.
White Americans who voted for Trump might be perfectly happy for the federal government to be crippled and broken by Trump’s appointees — the whole system’s rotten, after all, so why not bring it crashing down? How long that sentiment survives amid natural disasters or terrorist attacks will be an interesting question.
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