Originally Broadcast Saturday, November 4, 2006
Washington, D.C.
Mr. Morales: Good morning, and welcome to The Business of Government Hour. I'm Albert Morales, your host, and managing partner of The IBM Center for The Business of Government. We created the Center in 1998 to encourage discussion and research into new approaches to improving government effectiveness. You can find out more about the Center by visiting us on the web at businessofgovernment.org.
The Business of Government Radio Hour features a conversation about management with a government executive who is changing the way government does business. Our special guest this morning is David Paulison, DHS Under Secretary of Federal Emergency Management and Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Good morning, David.
Mr. Paulison: Good morning.
Mr. Morales: And joining us in our conversation is Paul Hempstead, Director in IBM's Homeland Security practice.
Good morning, Paul.
Mr. Hempstead: Good Morning.
Mr. Morales: David, although many of our listeners might be familiar with the Federal Emergency Management Administration, or FEMA, perhaps you could share with us some history, when it was created, what its mission is today?
Mr. Paulison: The Agency was created in 1979, designed to assist people in major disasters, primarily filling in behind local communities and states when they become overwhelmed. Our primary focus is actually delivering supplies, delivering money to individual homeowners, and also repairing those public infrastructures destroyed during the disaster.
Mr. Morales: You gave us a brief overview. But to provide the proper context around the specific legislative mandates that define the scope of your organization, can you give us an overview of Robert T. Stafford Disaster Assistance and Emergency Relief Act? And could you elaborate on the specific program assistance provided by FEMA, such as the individual assistance and the public assistance programs?
Mr. Paulison: Yeah, the Stafford Act lays out exactly what FEMA is legally allowed to do and what type of dollars it provides, not only to individuals, but also to public entities like states or cities, or even some non-profit organizations.
On the individual assistance side, we can give up to $26,200, laid out in different blocks. So we can give money for repair of your home, or if your home is totally destroyed, we give rental assistance -- if your car has been destroyed, or even funeral expenses or medical expenses, things that are not covered by private insurance.
On the public side, the public works side, let's say if a fire station is destroyed or police station, or a library during a storm, FEMA can go in and help rebuild that facility back to the way it was before it was destroyed. What we can't do is improve it and make it better. But we can provide dollars to put it back basically to where it was before the storm.
Mr. Morales: Can you perhaps give us an example of some assistance that is not within the scope of FEMA?
Mr. Paulison: Well, let me think. I guess if we -- if you're home is insured, we cannot provide you dollars. We can't duplicate dollars from other federal agencies. If a system has been damaged, but not necessarily damaged by the storm -- in some particular instances where a lack of maintenance will cause a particular item to fail, and FEMA can't repair those. FEMA is also not allowed to get into actually building structures that did not exist before. We can't go in and build you a new house. We can provide dollars to help you do that, but we can't do that. We can provide rental assistance, but we can't go and build apartment buildings to house people in.
And that's why we are in the travel trailer business and the mobile home business, not necessarily where you want to be, but those are the restrictions that we have during the Stafford Act.
Mr. Morales: Great. Thank you.
Mr. Hempstead: David, describe for us please your role as director of FEMA. What are your official responsibilities, and how do you support the mission of DHS?
Mr. Paulison: Well, my role is actually to manage this organization. I was asked to come in and take over -- right after Katrina happened and Mike Brown left, they asked me to come in and take over, and I've told them I would get them through hurricane season. So my role is to manage this organization, to make sure it's run properly, make sure the dollars are spent like they should. And also, I fit into the Department of Homeland Security's hierarchy. So I work with the Secretary and Deputy Secretary to make sure that we help them fulfill this organization of protecting this country.
And that's kind of where we fit into that whole system.
Mr. Hempstead: How about the size of your budget? How many full-time employees do you have in FEMA and how many contractors and volunteers do you have available at any given period?
Mr. Paulison: FEMA's authorized strength is right around 2400 people, full-time employees. However, we have a group called Disaster Assistance Employees that we hire during a hurricane or during a storm when we have a need for more people.
Right now, FEMA has almost 8000 people working for it. We have full-time employees, we have employees that are called our core employees, those who were hired on a two-year basis or four-year basis, and our Disaster Assistance employees, we call them DAs.
We hire those as we move into hurricane season, and then as we get out of hurricane season, those people are laid off and we start over again. Not necessarily an ideal system that's set up. But right now, that's all we have. What we're trying to do with the '07 budget and the '08 budget is increase the number of full-time employees and depend less and less on those Disaster Assistance employees that are hired seasonally.
Mr. Morales: That must have some interesting impacts on your managerial systems, where you can almost double and triple your end strength in any one given year.
Mr. Paulison: It really does. It gives us some flexibility, but also has some major side effects. One of them is, you bring people into train them, they're there for six months and then they're laid off and then you have to start over again next year. So we're looking very carefully for a better way to manage this organization, better way to increase the full-time employees and perhaps even develop a disaster cadre that may be seasonal employees, but we train them throughout the year where we can continue to pay them all to keep them on our payroll, so we don't lose that experience.
We have to look at a better way to do this, and what we found out in Katrina was we brought in a lot of new people who did not necessarily understand all of FEMA's policies, all of our procedures, and oftentimes, bad information was given out, or different information. So we need to make sure we are more consistent with the information that we give out, and make sure that that the people we have are better trained and better qualified to do the job that they're required to do.
Mr. Morales: David, you have a fascinating background. Can you take some time and describe for our listeners the career path and how you began your career?
Mr. Paulison: Actually, I started off -- I was going to be a teacher; I majored in English literature in college. And I was in the middle of the term, so a friend of mine who was on the local fire department and I went on to applied and got hired as a firefighter, never intending to stay very long.
Well, 30 years later, I was still there. Became one of the first paramedics in the state of Florida. I was also our ship scuba diver, underwater rescue recovery diver. And then just simply moved up through the system as our local fire department merged into a larger fire department in the county. With my education and experience that I had, I was able to move up fairly quickly, becoming the chief of the fire department. I became the chief of the fire department just a few weeks before Hurricane Andrew came through, so that was a real challenging time for all of us.
Shortly after that, the county manager turned emergency management over to me to manage, and I ended up rebuilding that system and getting a lot of experience to deal with much more than just fire. We were dealing with mass migration, dealing with building collapse. We had an urban search and rescue team that responded around the world -- dealing with floods, dealing with hurricanes on a much larger scale than just what the fire department normally do.
So that gave me a lot of experience moving up to Washington, taking over the U.S. Fire Administration, where we do a lot more of an education-based as opposed to basic fire training. Then when I was asked to step up and take over FEMA, it was kind of a natural transition for me to move into that based on my past experience.
Mr. Morales: Just in terms of sizing, can you give us a sense of what is the -- what would be the total purview of a fire chief in South Florida?
Mr. Paulison: I think the fire chief of -- fire assistance in South Florida is a fairly comprehensive -- I'll pick my fire department particularly, but there are several others around that do the same type of thing. Obviously, we respond to fires. We also had one of the largest EMS systems in the country, Emergency Medical Services. We did all of our transports, responded to any type of disasters. We also had a helicopter fleet, trauma helicopters to transport trauma patients to our trauma center. We do, obviously, building inspections and those types of things. And we have the largest anti-snake venom cache in the country; what we keep in our fire department, respond all over the world with that. So it's a pretty comprehensive type of assistance that works kind of a more all-hazards type of an agency as opposed to just strictly a fire department.
Mr. Morales: Fascinating. How has your previous emergency management experience prepared you for your current leadership role as the head of FEMA?
Mr. Paulison: I think it's extremely important for the people coming in to FEMA to understand how that total emergency management system works out there. We cannot afford to bring people in who just have a political background. We need to have people who have been there and done that.
Take my background of handling hurricanes. I handled -- I was the incident commander of the ValuJet crash, several floods or mass migration. It gave me a pretty broad perspective of how our system works. So what I started doing is, the managers that I am bringing into FEMA now are people who have a lot of experience, decades of experience in dealing with emergency management, either through law enforcement, emergency medical services, emergency management, or even a fire background.
Mr. Morales: Great.
What are some of FEMA's key operational innovations and priorities for fiscal year 2007?
We will ask Under Secretary of Federal Emergency Management and Director of FEMA David Paulison to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.
(Intermission)
Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with David Paulison, Under Secretary of Federal Emergency Management and Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Also joining us in our conversation is Paul Hempstead, Director in IBM's Homeland Security practice.
David, what are some of the higher organizational priorities for fiscal year 2007?
Mr. Paulison: What we've been focusing on is taking those lessons learned from Katrina. We took those reports very seriously. We had quite few of them. GAO, the General Accounting Office -- we had the Inspector General's office; Congress came out with a report; the White House came out with a report, plus all of those things that we quite frankly saw ourselves that simply did not work in Katrina.
If I can focus on a couple of those, the primary failure that I saw was communications. It wasn't just equipment, although there were some equipment issues, but not having a good solid system in place to share information. There was a major breakdown in communications between the local community and the state, a major breakdown between the state of Louisiana and ourselves, and very honestly, a major breakdown inside the federal government itself.
Communication between FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security was not what it should have been. FEMA had not embedded itself into the site of Homeland Security; it was more of a rogue satellite. So that communication breakdown was there also.
We've been working for the last several months putting a system together, communication system. And quite frankly, the first responders in this country have been using for 30 years -- of having a unified command system, where you're sharing information, you're working out of the same place, either actually or virtually -- and having a system in place to be able to share that information, regardless of where that information comes in, whether it comes in from the first responder in the field or it comes in from a senator calling the President; that information should be able to be shared up and down the chain and horizontally across the system.
We have that system in place now, and it worked very, very well in Ernesto. We had a hurricane that was supposedly -- supposed to have gone into Texas, and then it was Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama and Florida, ended up going to North Carolina. And we had all those states on our communication system sharing that information back and forth. We had NORTHCOM on there; we had the National Guard, the Red Cross, and that system worked extremely well. So I'm very, very pleased with how that worked.
Mr. Morales: On this theme of communications, could you describe the plans to revamp FEMA's digital alert system to help provide better warning systems across the U.S.?
Mr. Paulison: Yeah, different type of a system. What we want to do is to be able to have a system in this country that is multi-focused, where it's not just one particular item. We want to be able to notify people if there is a disaster or a need to notify people for any particular reason, either through your cell phone, through your pager, your blackberry, television set, your radio, even still using the old outside warning system.
We don't want to depend on any one particular thing. So we are working with a digital alert system, working with Preparedness inside Homeland Security, to put a system together, that we were going to be able to do this, we have to be able to do this, because of our no-notice events that we know we're going to have.
Mr. Hempstead: You mentioned communications and how important it is to -- and you also mentioned the digital alert system. What other types of technologies and processes have been put in place to increase FEMA's communication ability during the immediate response phase of the disaster?
Mr. Paulison: One of the other big failures in communication was not having a visibility of what was happening on the ground, what we call situational awareness. There was not a system in place to do that. FEMA and Homeland Security have put together several what we call reconnaissance teams, that we will pre-deploy prior to a storm making landfall, and they'll have satellite cell phone equipment and also satellite video equipment, so we can see, real-time, what's going on.
FEMA and Homeland Security should have known what was happening at the Superdome, we should have known what was happening at the Convention Center, and we should have known what happened to the levees real-time. But we did not do that. We were dependent more on CNN and Fox and other news media, the radio, to feed us that information.
We now have the capability to do this ourselves. Now, we still will depend on the news media -- there's a partnership, they're a symbiotic relationship that has to exist. And so we have to share that information back and forth. But now we have the capability of seeing those types of things real-time. That allows us to move equipment and people and supplies in much more quickly than we did in the past.
Mr. Hempstead: Well, now that you mentioned supplies, how has FEMA improved its logistics and commodity management to more efficiently and quickly supply state and local authorities with needed supplies?
Mr. Paulison: And that was the second biggest failure that I saw. Logistics is having the right things at the right places at the right time, and we did not do that very well. So we've done a couple of things.
One, we have in some cases quadrupled the amount of supplies that we had during Katrina, and I'll give you one example. MREs, or Meals Ready to Eat, we had 160 tractor trailer loads of MREs prior to Hurricane Katrina, and now we have over 770 tractor trailer loads of MREs.
On top of that, we have signed a memorandum of understanding with the Defense Logistics Agency, which is the logistics arm of the U.S. Army, and in fact of all of the Department of Defense. They're our back-up; they will be moving supplies into our warehouses as we're moving them out. But probably as important as that is the ability to track those supplies. FEMA did not have a system in place to be able to track its supplies once it left the warehouse. We had tractor trailers that got lost, we had tractor trailers that just went home for the weekend, we had tractor trailers that went to the wrong place and we had no mechanism to change their route once they got on the road.
We've purchased 20,000 GPS units, satellite tracking system units, where we can literally stick them right on the truck and follow that truck right down to the very street corner of where that truck is, and that gives us the opportunity to tell the state where their supplies are and when they're going to arrive.
It's a tremendous business tool for us, a tremendous business tool for the states. They have the ability to tell exactly where those water trucks are, where the food trucks are, where the ice trucks are, where our blue tarps are, where our medicines are, and we can track those real-time now.
Mr. Hempstead: GPS is one technology. Have you also employed Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID?
Mr. Paulison: We have not, and that'll be our next phase. We put the GPS system in place first, that was the easiest to track those to the entire truck. What we can't track is individual commodities once they're loaded off the truck. So the RFID type of things will be the next phase to go into. What we do, FEMA's job is to deliver supplies to the state. It's up to the state to distribute the supplies down to the end-user. Sometimes there's a breakdown there. So we're looking and working with the states on how we can better make the system work much more smoothly and much more agilely.
Mr. Morales: David, you mentioned the part of the role and responsibility of states, part of the role and responsibility of FEMA with respect to the supplies. Is there also a role for the providers --the private sector, in provisioning those supplies also?
Mr. Paulison: One of the things that we have not done well in the past is partnering with the private sector, and we're looking at that very closely on how we can do that. There is a lot of expertise out there, a lot of supplies out there, a lot of business tools that we have not tapped into that we need to start doing.
So we've been talking to and working with a lot of the big suppliers, the Wal-Marts, the Home Depots, Lowes, all those other big suppliers and how they provide transportation, how they do distribution, and also how we can plug them into our system to fill in those gaps that we simply can't meet.
Mr. Morales: Among other things in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was the issue around debris removal, and certainly there has been a fair amount of scrutiny around that process.
What has FEMA done to streamline the removal of debris from the disaster, and how has it become more flexible?
Mr. Paulison: Debris removal has been a thorn in all of our sides probably since before the inception of FEMA. How would you deal with the massive amount of debris you have and what do you do with it and what's the most efficient way to get it off the street, to get your community back up and running together?
One of the issues with debris removal was the way we reimbursed local communities in the past. There is -- when the President declares -- approves a declaration for disaster, there is a cost share involved in that. It should be 75 percent federal government, 25 percent local, or it could be a 90:10 split, or it could be 100 percent all entirely federal government. With the Corps of Engineers, which is our primary debris removal agency, if a local community used the Corps, we always reimbursed them at 100 percent. If they used their own contractor, which sometimes may be more efficient, we did the cost share. So there was no incentive for local communities to go and have contracts in place ahead of time. So we've done away with that. We're going to pay the same whether you use the Corps or whether you use your local contractor.
And what we are encouraging communities to do is to go out and pre-register and have contracts in place ahead of time. We've put a debris registry system in place and listed those contractors on our website; I think we have over 300 now that allow local communities to go out and have those contracts in place ahead of time. So as soon as the winds die down, either the Corps can come in and start working or they can have their own contractors. That gives the cities and states much more flexibility in getting this debris off the street and getting the community back up and running again.
Mr. Morales: I would imagine you work very closely with the Environmental Protection Agency, or the EPA, around some of these issues of various items and where and how they're disposed of?
Mr. Paulison: Yeah, EPA has to be involved, particularly when you're talking about moving stuff into landfills. I know during Hurricane Andrew, we took 30 years off our landfill by the amount of debris. So we're going to make sure we put in the right debris in there, making sure those landfills last as long as we possibly can, and put the right type of debris in the right type of landfill.
Mr. Morales: That's incredible. 30 years, that's quite a bit for a landfill.
Mr. Paulison: It's significant hit on anytime you have a disaster, you know, these landfills only have a certain life expectancy, and when you take 20 or 30 years off of them with one storm, that has a significant impact on the community.
Mr. Morales: Right.
What are some of FEMA's key managerial enhancements?
We will ask Under Secretary of Federal Emergency Management and Director of FEMA David Paulison to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.
(Intermission)
Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with David Paulison, Under Secretary of Federal Emergency Management and Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Also joining us in our conversation is Paul Hempstead, director in IBM's Homeland Security Practice.
David, given your broad emergency management background from fire rescue to emergency disaster management, we'd like to get a sense of your management approach. Could you provide us with an overview of your approach and your leadership style?
Mr. Paulison: Sure. I've always taken the approach of going through this as partnerships. I don't care for the I'm the boss, you're the employee attitude. Everybody has to be a part of the decision-making process. Now, I don't want to mislead you. I make the final decision. You have to have somebody who's in charge, somebody who's responsible for making those decisions. But I think that every employee has to feel like they're part of that system and part of the decision-making process.
So as I put my team together, you have several layers; you also have your top management team, and you cascade down the system. But I tell them very clearly that they are partners in this. This is not dictatorial at all. And that's served me well for the last 30 years, and that's how I'm going manage FEMA, that's how I'm managing FEMA. And it's working very well, where my staff feels like they're part of the system.
Also, sometimes in federal government, you get a distinction between the political appointees and the career employees. And I don't use that distinction at all. If you're on my team, you're on my team. It doesn't matter whether you're a political appointee or you're a career. You're going to sit at the table and help us make those decisions.
Mr. Morales: That's great.
Disasters can be very emotional times for victims, and typically for these victims, recovery begins when basic human needs such as food, clothing, and shelter are met. After every catastrophic event, emergency commodities are vital, and certainly cash is king.
After a major disaster, how does FEMA get multiple emergency benefits into the hands of those who need it the most?
Mr. Paulison: We talked about that earlier, about the process we put in place to really beef up our supplies and be able to track the supplies. The other piece of it is also pre-positioning and pre-deploying. We have pre-positioned caches around this country. Right now, we're focused on the Gulf Coast in Florida and up the Atlantic Coast for hurricanes. But we have supplies, quite frankly, all over the country. But it's also is pre-deploying those supplies. During Ernesto, we moved literally millions of pounds of supplies as we tracked the storm across the country, to make sure that they're going to be as close as you can get them to the disaster without putting them in harm's way. And that's a close call sometimes, but we want to make sure we can move them in quickly.
Our system is to move those supplies into a state and turn those over to the state, one of their staging areas, and then from there, the state's responsibility is to move those down towards what we call the PODs, or Points Of Distribution, that's where the individuals pick up those supplies.
However, the approach that I'm taking is different than what we used in the past. In the past, the approach has been you wait for a local community to become overwhelmed before the state steps in, and then we wait for the state to become overwhelmed before we move in. That system did not work in Katrina, and will not work in any major event. My approach is to go into this as a partnership. So you fill those gaps, you fill those deficiencies before there's a failure in the system. So we're side by side. It's almost as if it's an all-for-one and one-for-all type of a system. We are in it together; we're in it together as partners. And this is what I'm trying to sell to the states and local communities, not for us to come in and take over. I'm from a local community and I never wanted the federal government to come and take over my disaster. However, we need to be there side by side, and I think people are starting to pay attention to this.
We've had conferences in the past where I get to talk to emergency managers and explain how I want to approach this. And I see a lot of head-nodding in the audiences when I do this. I think they understand that these types of disasters, the Hurricane Katrinas or -- God forbid we have another terrorist event, it simply quickly overwhelms the local community and the state, and we have to go into this as partners.
If we do that, if we really do that, I think we're going to do a much, much better job of getting supplies down to where the end user is, the victim. And the victim has to come first, and that's our philosophy in FEMA.
Mr. Morales: So really the local community, the local government is responsible for the triaging of those supplies and materiel to those who need it the most?
Mr. Paulison: That's correct. They know the community better than the federal government. I can't sit in Washington and tell you where the best place in Idaho to distribute supplies. But that local community can and that state emergency manager can and that governor can. So our job is to get them the supplies and help them as best we can with the distribution process, but they have to tell us where they have to go and what the needs are.
Mr. Hempstead: Given the magnitude of funding going to disaster relief, what has FEMA done to mitigate the rising levels of fraud? And it's really on two different planes; for internal things with contracts, officers, IG, whatever, and also externally. Has FEMA explores specific technologies to manage identity verification in order to limit fraudulent claims?
Mr. Paulison: I think you clearly pointed out the two issues that we're dealing with. One is internal. Going into Katrina, FEMA did not have a lot of contracts in place and had to do those either with a no-bid or a hurry-up bid process, and we ended up with contracts that quite frankly didn't serve us very well. There were not a lot of things in place for us to monitor those contracts better, to have a better product in the end, to hold those contractors accountable for what the outcome was going to be. So what we have done for this up year, we have already put contracts in place and put those on the shelf where we have those contracts already ready to go. So if need something, we can just pull it off the shelf and use it.
We've already bid those contracts out. They're like we want them. They have the safeguards in place to make sure that we can hold those contractors accountable to do their job. Second piece is individual fraud. What we saw with Katrina, especially with the expedited assistance program, where we gave out $2,000 to individuals, it really caused us major problems. We had people literally in every state in this country. We didn't know who they were, we didn't know where they were, and we didn't know what their needs were. We made a conscious decision to give out those dollars. People were picked off their rooftops; they had only the clothes on their back. I mean literally sometimes they had only the clothes on their back. They had no identification, no insurance papers, no access to their bank accounts. It was the right decision to do, and I would do it again.
However, what we did not have in place was a strong identity verification system where we could tell you are who you say you are, and you lived where you said you lived. And we have since put a contract in place with an identity verification company to do that. That will cut out most all of that type of fraud, so we will know who you are, we'll know that you live in a place that's been destroyed or at least in an area that has been destroyed, and that way, we can give you the money, comfortably knowing we're giving it to the right person.
Mr. Hempstead: We talked with many of our guests about collaboration. Collaboration is absolutely critical for success of your organization. Could you tell us about your plan to place collaboration at the forefront of a more agile and flexible FEMA?
And how does the recent Memorandum of Understanding with DLA, as you mentioned before, illustrate the importance of collaboration?
Mr. Paulison: Collaboration is more than just collaboration with other government agencies. We have to be collaborative with the local government, with the state government, working with private sector like the Red Cross, working with other agencies to make sure we have those agreements in place, have those MoUs in place ahead of time.
One of the things we are doing also is doing prescript admission assignments, where we can depend on other agency, we know what they're going to do, they know what's expected of them, and we know they're capable of doing it. And we're talking about agencies like the Department of Defense, with Health and Human Services, Department of Transportation -- all those agencies we work with on a regular basis, we know they're going to respond with us to a disaster.
Have these prescript admission assignments, so they know what they're going to be asked to do, we know what their capabilities are, and we know they're going to perform and respond as we ask them to do. All that stuff takes that collaboration you're talking about, and that's what we've been working on this last year to make sure those things are in place so there's no second guessing, there's no surprises; we know exactly what to expect from these agencies, and they know what's going to be expected of them.
Mr. Morales: David, I dare say that FEMA arguably carries some of the greatest expectations by citizens of this country. Are there legislative changes needed, such as amending portions of the Stafford Act in order to make FEMA a more nimble organization that can more effectively respond to emergencies?
Mr. Paulison: Well, we are taking -- we've taken those lessons learned in Katrina and very carefully noted what the Stafford Act was able to do for us and what it was not able to do for us. We're working with Congress, we're working with -- through the White House, working with the Department of Homeland Security to take the Stafford Act apart, look at where it needs to be fixed, where it needs to be tweaked, to help us become a much more nimble organization than we were in the past.
The Stafford Act is restrictive. Sometimes that's intentional. Congress very clearly has laid out what they want the federal government to do in these disasters and what they feel like is a local or state responsibility. So FEMA is not this huge gigantic organization that can do everything. It is a shared responsibility shared between the local, the state, and the federal government. We want to make us much more flexible and less bureaucratic. And those are the things we want to fix in the Stafford Act.
However, what we don't want to do is take all the responsibility away from the state and local community and dump it all on the federal government. That's not a system that would work well or serve us well.
Mr. Morales: David, we talked a little bit about collaboration, we talked a little bit about the roles of states, of governments and of the private sector. I want to talk a little bit now about the individual citizen.
A recent Harvard survey noted that only about 25 percent of those surveyed said they would actually evacuate if they lived in an evacuation zone. Couple this with another survey that noted that about 60 percent of the respondents did not have a personal emergency preparedness plan.
What can FEMA do to reiterate the vital importance of individual preparedness to complement first responder efforts?
Mr. Paulison: I don't know that it's a FEMA responsibility. I can tell you this is one of my pet peeves. When people are in an evacuation zone and they're told to or asked to evacuate and do not do so, that puts a tremendous strain on the local first responders. Now they have to spend time rescuing people who should have been able to take care of themselves, and they cannot focus on those who simply could not take care of themselves.
The same goes for a personal preparedness plan. Having a plan in place so if you're going to evacuate -- if you live in an evacuation zone, you need to have a plan in place of how are you going to move out, where are you going to go, and where are you going to stay, what things you're going to take with you. It doesn't take much to do that.
But also, even if you're not living in an evacuation zone, every family in this country as much as possible should have 72 hours of food, water, medicine, flashlights, batteries, portable radios, those things they need to take care of themselves for the first three days.
It doesn't matter where you are in this country. Every part of this country has natural disasters or some type of disaster. To be able to do that, it takes about three days for this whole system to get geared up and start moving.
So particularly in a no-notice event like an earthquake or even a terrorist event where we can't pre-position supplies, we can't pre-deploy supplies, they have to be able to take care of themselves. Now, there are some of us out there who can't do that, either fiscally or physically cannot take care of themselves. Those are the ones that the local community, the state and the federal government should be focusing on. Not the rest of us who are able-bodied and have the ability to get those supplies in place and protect and take the personal responsibility for taking care of themselves and our families.
I'll give you an example. Hurricane Wilma going through Florida last year -- not a devastating hurricane, a Category 1, maybe Category 2 at the most. My home is down there, you know, had some roof tiles gone, trees down, things like that destroyed, but the houses were intact.
My wife and daughters, who were riding out the hurricane by themselves, like they usually are because I'm never home, did not have to go stand in line for food and water. They had taken care of themselves; they had their food, the water, the flashlights, the batteries. Our little barbecue pit was -- had propane gas in it so they were out back cooking black beans and rice and chicken right after the winds died down.
But we had tens of thousands of people lined up around the Orange Bowl and through other places in the state for food, water, and ice when they shouldn't have had to do that. They should have been able to take care of themselves. We could hardly keep up with the amount of supplies that was being drained off that system because people didn't take care of themselves, and that should not have happened.
So everyone should be able to take care of themselves, or most people should be able to, those that are able-bodied to protect yourself and your family, just take some personal responsibility.
Mr. Morales: I think that's a very important message to all of our listeners. Thank you.
What does the future hold for FEMA?
We will ask Under Secretary of Federal Emergency Management and Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency David Paulison to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.
(Intermission)
Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with David Paulison, Under Secretary of Federal Emergency Management and Director of FEMA.
Also joining us in our conversation is Paul Hempstead, director in IBM's Homeland Security Practice.
David, given the critical lessons learned in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and certainly we've talked about many here, how do you envision the role of your office changing within the next 5 to 10 years?
Mr. Paulison: I think Katrina -- not only I think -- I know Katrina was a wake-up call for not only FEMA, but pretty much every emergency manager across this country. As I meet with them and talk with them, they're all asking the same question: what if that was my city, what if that was my state, would I have handled things differently, would I have been better prepared?
So I see FEMA in the future, FEMA in the next 5 to 10 years, we have to become a much more nimble organization, we have to become much more of a -- developing a partnership with our local and state partners out there, working together. I talked earlier about going to a disaster as partners. But it's got to be more than that; it's got to be training together, doing exercises together, planning together, making sure that we have all of our systems in place, we know who's going to do what. FEMA needs to be much more collaborative, much more of a partner as we move into this new system than we have in the past.
We can no longer be the big brother or the parent-child relationship that we've had in the past. We truly have to be siblings; we have to be partners as we go into this whole disaster thing, and I see that development -- I see a lot of emergency managers out there recognizing that we have to do that, and we have to bring the federal government in, that we have to go side by side.
So I think that's the biggest changes I see.
Mr. Morales: So you do see that local entities are taking more responsibility in this area of emergency response?
Mr. Paulison: Not only emergency response, emergency planning. We have to have better disaster plans in place across this country. You go to -- some cities do a very good job. I'll give you an example.
I just visited New York City, and they have just come out with a 300-some-odd page disaster plan for a hurricane coming to New York City. And how are we going to evacuate Manhattan with 3-1/2 million people? Where are they going to go and how are you going to put that system in place? They did an outstanding job of putting that together. And I see other cities doing the same thing.
Look at California, they're working with earthquakes, and Florida with hurricanes and others. Katrina, like I said, was a wake-up call, and now you see these big cities and smaller cities putting better evacuation plans together, putting better response plans together of how we're going to -- what are we going to do if we have a disaster in our city?
Mr. Morales: As the country's chief emergency response organization, FEMA plays a critical role in security and safety of our country. To that end, what steps are being taken to attract and maintain a high quality technical workforce?
Mr. Paulison: A big issue for FEMA. We're having a major turnover. Just this year, we've already had 150 people retire. A lot of our senior executives who have left and moved on to other things. So my job is to put a system in place to attract those.
What I've started doing is, at least at a leadership level of FEMA, I'm sending a message to our employees, because I'm only bringing in people who are highly qualified with decades of experience, and that sends a message to our people: I'm serious about rebuilding FEMA. That in turn will start attracting people at the lower level. People like technicians to come in to work with FEMA. If they see that we're serious about rebuilding FEMA, that at least at the management side, I'm bringing in very qualified, educated, experienced people, that will attract good people from the bottom and the technicians to come and to help us manage this organization and rebuild it.
Mr. Hempstead: David, you mentioned before about a relatively small employee workforce you have, and then a large influx of temporary employees. What do you do to ensure that the employees and those people have appropriate training and skills?
And what is FEMA doing to ensure that it has the right staff mix to meet challenges afforded by both natural and manmade disasters?
Mr. Paulison: Two things you mentioned there. One is the size of the staff. We know that we have to increase the size of our permanent full-time workforce. We can no longer depend on the Disaster Assistance Employees to beef up every time we have a disaster. I've been working with Congress, working with the Homeland Security, and with the White House, on how we can increase the size of FEMA over the next several years so we can accomplish all the things the American public expects us to do.
The other part is training. FEMA has not had a very robust training system in place to make sure that our employees are the best there can be. So we're in the process of doing that. We know we have to do that. We know that if our employees are going to be asked to perform like the public expects us to do, we have to have a rock solid training system in place to give them tools to do the job.
Mr. Morales: David, we talk with many of our guests about the impending retirement wave in government, and you just mentioned about 110 folks that you recently had retire. How are you handling these retirements and your potential future retirements?
Mr. Paulison: Well, we're not handling retirement; they're leaving on their own.
But, what we're doing is advertising -- we're taking full page ads in publications like New York Times or Wall Street Journal. We have to recruit, do better recruiting, and go to community colleges, go to higher levels of institution to recruit the best and the brightest to come into FEMA.
FEMA has a great, great mission. Our job is to help people. We feel, we believe that we can attract some of the brightest stars coming out of these colleges to come into FEMA to bring that intelligence they bring, and bring that enthusiasm to fill in the gap behind the retirements.
Every agency goes through this from time to time. We have a major exodus of people retiring, and it's very painful. It's very painful, it's tough. But in the long run, it's good for the organization, because you bring in a lot of new fresh blood, new ideas, a different generation. Although it's tough now -- it's very difficult right now in the amount of people we're losing -- especially the good people we're losing. But I think in the next 5 to 10 years, you're going to see a new invigorated FEMA that will bring in these new people and have an exciting -- we're -- it's going to be exciting organization. I'm really am excited about it.
Mr. Morales: That's great.
Do you find yourself competing for similar skills with local entities, local governments as well as the private sector?
Mr. Paulison: Oh, no question about it. Not only competing at the local level, competing with other federal agencies, especially the agencies -- trying to bring in good solid procurement officers and contract managers. All of the agencies in the federal government are competing for the same people. So we have to show them that we're the agency they want to work for. And I think our mission does that. Like I said, FEMA has a great mission. There's not too many agencies out there that can say our sole purpose is to help people. And that attracts -- I think that's going to attract the right people.
Mr. Morales: That's fantastic. David, you've had an outstanding career.
What advice could you give to a person that was considering a career in public service, or perhaps for all those teachers that are about to start their career and perhaps want to get into emergency response?
Mr. Paulison: Well, first of all, teaching is a great career also. My brother is a teacher and I too did it for a while, too, and is a tremendous public service there also. Public service, particularly in emergency management side of it, is an exciting type of thing. You get to see things and do things that most people would never be able to do in their lifetimes. However, don't come in here if you want to be a millionaire. You know, public service is exactly that. It's a dedicated service, it's a sacrifice.
But it's the right thing. It's a very fulfilling type of a system to get into, and I would encourage anyone to do that. A lot of opportunities, a lot of places you can go, and lot of things, like I said, you'll see that most people would never get to see.
Mr. Morales: That's fantastic.
David, unfortunately, we have reached the end of our time.
I do want to thank you for fitting us into your busy schedule, but more importantly, Paul and I would like to thank you for your dedicated service to the public and our country as a leader in the field of emergency response and management. And we wish you all the best of luck as you lead the critical organization of FEMA.
Mr. Paulison: Thanks for the invitation. You know, we're encouraging people. Again, we talked a little earlier about people making sure they're prepared, they take responsibility for their own family. You can go to our FEMA website at fema.gov and get all of the ideas on there and examples of what you need to do to take care of yourself and your family as we go into this next year.
Mr. Morales: That's fantastic.
This has been The Business of Government Hour, featuring a conversation with David Paulison, Under Secretary of Federal Emergency Management and Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Be sure to visit us on the web at businessofgovernment.org. There, you can learn more about our programs and get a transcript of today's conversation. Once again, that's businessofgovernment.org.
As you enjoy the rest of your day, please take time to remember the men and women of our armed and civil services abroad who can't hear this morning's show on how we're improving their government, but who deserve our unconditional respect and support.
For The Business of Government Hour, I'm Albert Morales.
Thank you for listening.
