Planning is a Virtue, But Government Agencies Are Paid to Deliver Results
Planning is a Virtue, But Government Agencies Are Paid to Deliver Results
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is responsible for helping the American people before, during, and after a disaster (how-fema-works). It has vast responsibilities and the unenviable burden of never knowing when it will have to ramp up or what it will face.
Last week, President Trump raised the possibility of shutting down FEMA, saying, in effect, that FEMA was not doing its job well and states could do the job better. In just a few words, the President managed to throw FEMA under the bus, along with its more than 20,000 employees.
It is too soon to know if there will be consequences for the agency—but devolving its staff, responsibilities, and budget to the states has a high probability of being less effective than what we have today. Plus, the existing process is already built on federalist principles: FEMA only goes into the field when there is a local request conveyed to the agency through a governor’s request for national disaster designation.
Very few states and localities have a sufficiently trained workforce and available equipment in the case of a disaster. It is a costly solution to have each come up to full readiness year-round, versus having a co-op arrangement where common resources are available on an as-needed basis through FEMA.
Having FEMA on the ready also addresses interstate disasters and is responsive to the need for effective centralized command structure to coordinate in emergencies.
In all my years in Washington, I have dealt with FEMA only once. But it was instructive then….and relevant now to both FEMA and FDA.
At the time, I was at HHS and was asked to be the Acting Assistant Secretary for Health for two weeks while my boss traveled overseas. A Russian communications satellite was about to fall out of orbit and my primary responsibility was to coordinate with FEMA in case they needed Public Health Service involvement at a crash-site that could be anywhere in the world.
I was given a 100+ page FEMA briefing book. It was methodical in its analysis of possible scenarios, and it was comprehensive in scope. If you had the book, you knew how the US government was going to respond in any situation….and what you were responsible for doing.
Much of what I know about contingency planning I learned that week reading their briefing book. I was incredibly impressed by their preparation.
Near the end of my two weeks, the satellite came down in the early morning, crashing harmlessly into the sea. I heard about it first on the radio. I did not get my “all-clear” call for a couple more hours.
Despite all that beautiful planning….it took so long for the “all-clear” because FEMA had never set up a telephone chain[1] for efficiently distributing information to the task force outside of business hours!
That was a long time ago. Few people remember phone chains. But it reflects an important truth: no matter how thoroughly you plan, you cannot anticipate everything.
In any case--even with perfect plans and best of intentions--we are all judged by the results we achieve, not by the quality of the plan we worked from.
In that regard, FEMA and FDA have it rough. Their missions are different [2] [3], but they have in common that they require the agencies to plan for:
multiple,
constantly changing, and
largely unpredictable
challenges that reflect a rapidly changing and increasingly complex world.
That distinguishes FEMA and FDA from other agencies[4].
Because those challenges have become larger, more numerous, and even less predictable than in the past, Acting FEMA Administrator Cameron Hamilton (here) and FDA Commissioner-designate Marty Makay (here) will have far more difficult jobs than any of their predecessors.
Both agencies need to change to become more effective and efficient. But rather than moving boxes around on an organizational chart and calling it progress, the new Administration and Congress need to provide support—budgetary, advanced IT systems, etc. At the same time, the agencies need to act with more discipline as they: engage in more comprehensive, change-oriented planning; and streamline their operations to be more productive.
Fund appropriately. Plan better. Change sensibly. Achieve more. Those are big goals, but they are also the right ones for FEMA and FDA.
[1] https://www.dialmycalls.com/glossary/telephone-chain
[2] In FEMA’s case, the scope of their responsibilities includes natural and man-made disasters, mixed in with responsibilities that have no other home, such as pandemic response (here) and sheltering migrant children at the border (here).
[3] In FDA’s case, the scope of their responsibilities encompasses goods and services in the US that total about $2.7 trillion and involve every American multiple times every day.
[4] Since this is a blog about FDA, I should add that the scope of FDA jurisdiction makes it even more vulnerable to unpredictable events than FEMA. In addition to what I enumerated in footnote three, FDA-regulated products—raw ingredient and finished product—come from every nation in the world, even hostile ones.