Early September 2005: Officials and Experts Say FEMA’s Ability to Respond to Disasters Significantly Degraded Since 2000

A veteran FEMA official tells the Washington Post, “It’s such an irony I hate to say it, but we have less capability today than we did on September 11.” Another official tells the newspaper: “We are so much less than what we were in 2000. We’ve lost a lot of what we were able to do then.” Reprentative David E. Price (D-NC) says, “What we were afraid of, and what is coming to pass, is that FEMA has basically been destroyed as a coherent, fast-on-its-feet, independent agency.” [Washington Post, 9/4/2005] Similarly, Bill Waugh, an academic expert on emergency management at Georgia State University, tells the Wall Street Journal, “The events of the last week have shown is that over the last few years since 9/11 we have slowly disassembled our national emergency response system and put in its place something far inferior. We reinvented the wheel when we didn’t need to and now have something that doesn’t roll very well at all.” [Wall Street Journal, 9/6/2005]