Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions
STATEMENTS ON INTRODUCED BILLS AND JOINT RESOLUTIONS -- (Senate - July 25, 2006)
By Ms. COLLINS (for herself, Mr. Lieberman, and Mr. Salazar):
S. 3721. A bill to amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to establish the United States Emergency Management Authority, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, I rise to introduce S. 3721, the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006. It contains a vital set of reforms and innovations for our emergency-management systems that are designed to save lives and ease suffering when disaster strikes. The crafting of this bill has benefited from the insights of my principal cosponsor, Senator Lieberman, and from the support of our other cosponsor, Senator Salazar.
The Senate has already acted on one critical measure to apply the bitter lessons of Hurricane Katrina. The 87 to 11 vote on July 11, adding creation of the U.S. Emergency Management Authority to the Homeland Security appropriations bill, adopted a major element of today's bill. That was a great step forward.
The Senate Homeland Security Committee conducted an 8-month investigation with 23 hearings, more than 325 formal interviews, and a review of more than 838,000 pages of documents to ascertain why the response to Hurricane Katrina was so inadequate at all levels of government. The investigation revealed serious failures of leadership. It also revealed an urgent need for broad reforms ranging from communication-technology standards to the structure and missions of entire Federal agencies.
Some of the 88 recommendations that flowed from our investigation can be adopted by administrative action. The Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act comprises important steps that only Congress can take. I will outline the five key components of our bill.
First, we strengthen FEMA and rename it as the United State Emergency Management Authority, or US-EMA, to signify a fresh start. We elevate US-EMA within DHS, restore its preparedness authority, and protect it from departmental reorganizations that could erode its budget and assets. These measures give the agency mission and asset protections like those of its DHS siblings, the Coast Guard and the Secret Service.
These statutory protections are important. Securing the integrity of FEMA preserves the cooperative benefits of its operating within easy reach of other DHS agencies. It also avoids the duplication, cost, and confusion for State and local officials that would come from carving FEMA out as a weak, stand-alone agency for natural disasters. Keeping FEMA where it was placed by the Homeland Security Act of 2002 avoids the need for DHS to recreate a similar terror-response capability.
Improving contact and coordination among Federal, State, and local agencies is essential. For that reason, our bill provides for regionally based, multi-agency Federal strike teams that will be ready to act and deploy in a region they will already know and understand before a disaster occurs.
The bill also provides continued funding for the interstate Emergency Management Assistance Compact that proved so valuable in marshaling aid for the gulf coast last year. It commits the US-EMA to work with States and localities to develop a standardized credentialing system that will help responders and selected private-sector personnel move quickly into disaster areas anywhere in the country, and it requires the US-EMA to offer technical assistance to State and local governments.
To help remedy the communications gaps revealed by Hurricane Katrina, we also improve the agency's organizational and technical communications systems. Our bill designates the Administrator of the US-EMA as the principal advisor to the President on emergency-management issues. Meanwhile, national and regional advisory councils will ensure that the US-EMA has open channels of communication with State and local officials, emergency responders, key private-sector and nongovernmental entities, and with representatives of people with disabilities.
On the equally important technical side, our bill consolidates several communications programs within a new Office of Emergency Communications within US-EMA. This office will devise a national emergency-communications strategy, administer grants for interoperable communications, and regularly assess the operability and interoperability of the communication systems that are essential for disaster response and that failed so widely during the Katrina catastrophe.
This US-EMA portion of the bill has received a great deal of attention. But it is only one part of this package of essential reforms.
The second part of our bill permits an enhanced Federal role in emergency management when major disasters require it. The Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, better known as the Stafford Act, authorizes a variety of Federal assistance measures to State and local governments when the President has declared a disaster.
Congress has amended the Stafford Act over time to make it more effective. Our bill continues that process of improvement by applying lessons learned from Katrina.
At the highest level, it directs the Federal Government to develop and maintain a national disaster-recovery strategy in coordination with the State and local governments which will lead each recovery. This fills a remarkable planning void in our current system, which focuses on response. When disaster overwhelms state and local governments and devastates large areas, recovery can be a long process requiring extended Federal assistance.
We increase the potential for more effective Federal aid in several ways. For example, the legislation enhances Federal agencies' ability to respond when the President uses his authority to direct their assistance in major-disaster response and recovery.
The bill requires a national-disaster housing strategy and authorizes making semipermanent housing units a part of Stafford Act assistance. In many cases, the modular ``Katrina cottages,'' for example, would be less costly, safer, more livable, more easily sited, and more durable than the notorious trailers FEMA purchased.
A new title VII for the Stafford Act gives the President discretion to offer increased Federal assistance when disaster overwhelms state and local governments. This discretionary--but limited--authority for catastrophes includes raising the cap on individual assistance, assisting victims with rent or mortgage costs, extending disaster-unemployment benefits, increasing community loans, and raising the reimbursement to communities for the cost of food, clothes, and other essential goods they distribute to victims.
Among other Stafford Act revisions, our bill clarifies that Federal mitigation efforts can extend to man-made hazards like the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet that funneled deadly storm-surge waters toward New Orleans. It establishes a missing-child location system and a database to help reunite families, a major problem in the aftermath of Katrina. And it requires that planning and training exercises, as well as evacuation and sheltering plans, give consideration to people with disabilities or special needs, or who are not fluent in English, or who have pets.
These improvements to the Stafford Act would be a major accomplishment by themselves. But the demonstrated need for reforms goes deeper still.
The third key element of our bill will provide more and better-trained emergency professionals. The US-EMA will establish a contingency cadre to meet surge workforce needs; implement a human-capital strategy to improve recruitment, development, and retention; and make quarterly reports to Congress on staffing levels. These actions should reduce the chronic workforce shortfalls--at times as great as 25 percent--that have hobbled FEMA in the past.
Looking to staffing quality across the full spectrum, our bill creates a National Homeland Security Academy. The academy will offer both classroom and distance-learning instruction and training to DHS, state, and local homeland-security professionals.
The fourth element in our reform bill will correct the confusion and lack of training on incident management and unified-command operations that frustrated a fully effective response to Katrina. Our bill mandates a comprehensive review of the National Response Plan, and requires that the DHS Secretary employ the NRP and the National Incident Management System to guide Federal actions in a natural or manmade disaster.
The Secretary is also directed to work with the US-EMA Administrator and with the National Advisory Committee to implement a national training-and-exercise program to ensure that vital knowledge and skills are in place and are kept sharp.
The fifth key aspect of our bill targets the waste, fraud, and abuse that outraged both our compassion for disaster victims and our sense of stewardship for taxpayer dollars. Based on the investigations by our committee, the GAO, and the DHS inspector general, I believe far more than a billion dollars has been lost to waste, fraud, and abuse in the aftermath of Katrina. The purchase of unusable mobile homes, long-distance moving and storage of unneeded ice, and abuse of debit cards indicate that DHS has lacked even rudimentary controls to safeguard tax dollars.
Our bill directs the Department to identify emergency-response requirements that can be contracted in advance with pre-screened vendors, so that vital commodities and services can be secured and delivered promptly. This simple change could curtail the waste of time and money as officials scramble to make ad-hoc purchase and distribution arrangements, often paying excessive prices. We also provide for a contingency corps of Federal contracting officers who can work in the field for an extended period following a disaster, so that response and recovery spending is better directed and controlled than with Katrina.
Our bill also faces the unfortunate reality that thieves and con artists will try to abuse even programs for disaster victims. Our bill imposes civil and criminal penalties for misrepresentation, requires fraud-awareness training for contracting officers and for the relief workforce, mandates systems to verify identities and addresses, and requires issuing explicit directions on legitimate uses of purchase cards.
Our bill is no single-issue, silver-bullet exercise but a careful and comprehensive program of improvement and innovation. It takes on each of the vital areas that our Hurricane Katrina investigation determined require action by Congress: reconstituting FEMA, updating and expanding the Stafford Act, improving emergency staffing, enhancing planning and preparedness, and reducing waste, fraud, and abuse.
Floods, earthquakes, storms, fires, and other natural disasters are abiding threats that exempt no one living on this planet. And the threat of manmade disasters has, perhaps permanently, forced itself into our plans for sustaining this great Nation.
Hurricane Katrina showed us in tragic terms that our mechanisms for disaster mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery urgently need many improvements. If we leave untouched the gaps, the confusions, and the missteps revealed during Katrina, we will see more unnecessary loss of life and prolonged misery. We do not know when the next great disaster will strike, or what form it will take. But we know it will come. We know what needs to be done. The Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act gives us the tools to do it.
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