[Mb-civic] The Crony FairyBy PAUL KRUGMAN

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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April 28, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Crony Fairy
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The U.S. government is being stalked by an invisible bandit, the Crony
Fairy, who visits key agencies by dead of night, snatches away qualified
people and replaces them with unqualified political appointees. There's no
way to catch or stop the Crony Fairy, so our only hope is to change the
agencies' names. That way she might get confused, and leave our government
able to function.

That, at least, is how I interpret the report on responses to Hurricane
Katrina that was just released by 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.

Rather than trying to fix FEMA, the report calls for replacing it with a new
organization, the National Preparedness and Response Agency. As far as I can
tell, the new agency would have exactly the same responsibilities as FEMA.
But "senior N.P.R.A. officials would be selected from the ranks of
professionals with experience in crisis management." 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.

O.K., enough sarcasm. Let's talk about the history of FEMA.

In the early 1990's, FEMA's reputation was as bad as it is today. It was a
dumping ground for political cronies, headed by a man whose only apparent
qualification for the job was that he was a close friend of the first
President Bush's chief of staff. FEMA's response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992
perfectly foreshadowed Katrina: the agency took three days to arrive on the
scene, and when it did, it proved utterly incompetent.

Many people thought that FEMA was a lost cause. But Bill Clinton proved them
wrong. He appointed qualified people to lead the agency and gave them leeway
to hire other qualified people, and within a year FEMA's morale and
performance had soared. For the rest of the Clinton years, FEMA was among
the most highly regarded agencies in the federal government.

What happened to that reputation? The answer, of course, is that the second
President Bush returned to his father's practices. Once again, FEMA became a
dumping ground for cronies, and many of the good people who had come in
during the Clinton years left. It took only a few years to transform one of
the best agencies in the U.S. government into what Senator Susan Collins
calls "a shambles and beyond repair."

In other words, the Crony Fairy is named George W. Bush.

So what's the point of creating a new agency to replace FEMA? The history of
FEMA and other agencies during the Clinton years shows that a president who
is serious about governing can rebuild effective government without renaming
the boxes on the organizational chart.

On the other hand, the history of the Bush administration, from the botched
reconstruction of Iraq to the botched start-up of the prescription drug
program, shows that a president who isn't serious about governing, who
prizes loyalty and personal connections over competence, can quickly reduce
the government of the world's most powerful nation to third-world levels of
ineffectiveness.

And bear in mind that Mr. Bush's pattern of cronyism didn't change after
Katrina. For example, he appointed Julie Myers, the inexperienced niece of
Gen. Richard Myers, to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement ‹ an agency
that, like FEMA, is supposed to protect us against terrorism as well as
other threats. Even at the C.I.A., the administration seems more interested
in purging Democrats than in improving the quality of intelligence.

So let's skip the name change for FEMA, O.K.? The United States will regain
effective government if and when it gets a president who cares more about
serving the nation than about rewarding his friends and scoring political
points. That's at least a thousand days away. Meanwhile, don't count on
FEMA, or on any other government agency, to do its job.

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