Informant38

Mr. TAYLOR of Mississippi:

"Mr. Speaker, I would like to speak with deep regret at the continued efforts of the majority to hide from the American people the true nature of the deficit that they have employed; that they have increased more debt in 2 years than in the first 200 years of our Nation. Their answer to that debt is $80 billion of more debt.
I do not think you should dare call yourself fiscal conservatives. I think what you should call yourself are the seeds of destruction for the greatest Nation this world has ever known."

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The new Federal Emergency Management Agency director on Wednesday[28.09.05] praised the prompt response by Mississippi and federal emergency officials to Hurricane Katrina.

"We're so impressed with the state we're using it as a model (for future disasters)," said R. David Paulson, at a news conference in Jackson. "It was something we've not seen in a long time. There was a unified system and the sharing of information."

Reached in Washington, 4th District U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor responded:

"I hope he's not calling it a model when local responders have to loot grocery stores to get their food. ... It's certainly not a model."

[...]
Taylor found it incredulous FEMA officials passed out brochures with the toll-free number to people with no working phones, he said.

"I hope he's not calling that a model. If so, he's as out of touch as the guy he replaced."

[...]
On Wednesday[28.09.05], Gov. Haley Barbour appeared on the CNN program, The Situation Room, where host Wolf Blitzer asked him about Taylor's assessment that FEMA deserved an F-minus for its response.

"That's why they got chocolate and vanilla, Wolf," replied Barbour, who has praised the partnership between state and federal officials.

Jerry Mitchell/Clarion-Ledger 29.09.05
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Taylor says his idea will be a tough sell to skeptical congressmen who will say people should have known better. But Taylor says no one could have known.

"I parked my truck in a place that had never flooded in Bay St. Louis's history. It went four feet under water. So again, I don't consider myself a dummy and I don't think any of these other people that have gone through this are dumb people. We just had something unimaginable happen."

Marcia Hill/WLOX 26.09.05
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He was just another Democratic politician in a GOP-controlled Congress focusing on the issues of the day: Iraq, health care and terrorism.

But since Hurricane Katrina barreled into the state and wiped out a good chunk of his coastal district - including his own Bay St. Louis home of 28 years - the 16-year congressman has transformed into a new breed of public servant.
He is now living with his family in a small home owned by his brother in Hancock County and working out of mobile units since the storm flooded his Gulfport office and ripped off the roof of his Ocean Springs office. A third mobile unit was set up in Bay St. Louis since Katrina also wiped out bridges in the area.
He is part sleuth, part relief worker and part civil engineer. And his phone lines are lit up.

"I wish there was a better way to make the front page of USA Today than to have my house blown down," Taylor said with a laugh. "I was hoping it would be on passing health care for reservists or something."

Julie Goodman/Clarion-Ledger 16.10.05
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To improve communications, DHS is "looking at ways to adapt military and advanced private sector communication technology for emergency use," Chertoff said.

"FEMA must work to replenish its ranks at the senior level with experienced staff," he added.
"I've brought in some experts from the private sector as well as from the military and inside the government to look at FEMA's business practices, to really re-engineer them for the 21st century," Chertoff told the lawmakers. "And, obviously as that study goes forward, that's going to identify additional things that we may need to do."

Chris Strohm/GovExec 21.10.05
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Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., criticized Chertoff's plan to use a "just-in-time" logistics strategy, saying he does not believe it would work during a disaster, especially when roads may not be passable.

"A hurricane is anything but an ideal world," Taylor said. "The aftermath of a nuclear, biological or chemical attack is going to be anything but an ideal world. The roads will not be passable. There will not be electricity. There will not be communications."

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Chertoff's pretending to just be one of the crowd - this is a man who heads the US Department of Homeland Security and he's talking like he just now found out FEMA's one of his responsibilities.
Here's Chertoff on July 13 this year:

"To ensure that our preparedness efforts have focused direction, we intend to consolidate the Department's existing preparedness efforts -- including planning, training, exercising, and funding -- into a single directorate led by an Under Secretary for Preparedness. Going forward, FEMA will be a direct report to the Secretary - but it will now focus on its historic and vital mission of response and recovery. The importance of this latter capacity was illustrated powerfully as Hurricane Dennis made landfall this week."

and a UPI story on Chertoff's restructuring of the DHS, on July 12 this year:

The long-awaited results of the so-called Second Stage Review that Chertoff launched in March are being closely held, but United Press International has spoken to several government officials present at briefings about Wednesday's roll out. All spoke on condition that they not be named or quoted directly, but their accounts of what Chertoff planned to announce tallied closely.
The change that is likely to draw the most attention as the country braces itself for the annual hurricane season is that the department's Emergency Preparedness and Response Directorate is being dismantled. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency that currently makes up the bulk of the directorate, will return to being a stand-alone entity within the department, with a director, rather than the current undersecretary, reporting to straight to Chertoff.
But in a move that is likely to draw howls of protest from state and local emergency managers and FEMA's allies on Capitol Hill, the agency is being stripped of its preparedness functions, to concentrate on what some in the department see as its core competencies -- disaster response and recovery.

"It's going to be very difficult to argue the case that it makes sense to spilt up preparedness and response," said one former FEMA official who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivities of his current employer. "It's difficult enough (to plan responses to major disasters) when both those functions are in one place.
It's unclear how separating them will bring them into better sync."

Shaun Waterman/UPI 12.07.05

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FEMA has been under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security since March 1, 2003.
Chertoff has been the Secretary of Homeland Security since March 3, 2005.

Gene Taylor's the most inspiring politician I've seen in a long time.