Modern American politics is a kind of media-saturated, accelerated populism. This has led naturally to a nationalisation of crisis response. At the time of the Galveston hurricane of 1900, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the Mississippi flood of 1927, America's federal government bore little responsibility. But today, the public watches disasters on realtime television, sees bodies in the streets, and expects the federal government to act.
The administration of George Bush Snr was criticised for its failure to respond quickly to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and other major disasters. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), created only a decade earlier, was a poorly financed dumping ground for minor courtiers.
Bill Clinton had a better grasp of disaster politics. He gave Fema cabinet-level status, expanded its budget, and promised that the agency would not wait for a governor's phone call before it deployed resources. To head Fema, Clinton chose James Lee Witt, who had experience and sound political sense. A Witt-clone became the hero of a 1997 NBC mini-series in which Fema rescued the citizens of Dallas from devastation caused by a wayward asteroid.
The second President Bush, by contrast, appears to have retraced his father's steps. Bush's first Fema director, Joseph Allbaugh, was his campaign manager during the 2000 election. Allbaugh told congress in early 2001 that it was time to "restore the predominant role of state and local response to most disasters." 9/11 did not shake this view. If anything, pressure to divert resources to anti-terrorism efforts in other parts of the new homeland security department accelerated the deterioration of Fema's natural disaster capabilities. Bush's decision to appoint Michael Brown as Allbaugh's successor in 2003 reflected his view of Fema's significance. Brown, an old friend of Allbaugh, was a Republican activist who had previously worked as overseer of judges for the International Arabian Horse Association.
However, the botched federal response is not simply the product of Bush's miscalculations. It is also in part a crisis of the system. While media-saturated politics encourages federalisation of disaster response, federal intervention is also heavily constrained by America's decentralisation of power and the unpopularity of central government. The law limits what federal officials can do without the consent of state governors. White House officials now complain that Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco undercut the federal response by dickering over lines of authority; they also claim that a federal intrusion without Blanco's consent would have seemed heavy-handed.
And although the public turns to the federal government in emergencies, polls show that most Americans are dissatisfied with the size and power of the federal bureaucracy. One consequence is broad public support for Bush's programme of tax reduction. A 2003 poll found that most Americans were opposed to a rollback of Bush's tax cuts to pay for better homeland security and the "global war on terror," preferring instead to see budget cuts elsewhere or increased borrowing.
Because costly entitlement programmes such as social security and Medicare are ring-fenced, it is so-called "discretionary" spending—the money required for the civilian bureaucracy—that feels the pinch. Even homeland security, a priority after 9/11, has struggled for funding. The two federal agencies at the centre of the post-Katrina storm were caught in this budgetary vice. Fema, which in 2001 called a hurricane-induced flood of New Orleans one of the three "likeliest, most catastrophic disasters" facing the US, has had its budget for disaster preparedness and mitigation cut every year since 2003. Many demoralised Fema officials have left the agency. The Army Corps of Engineers, which warned last May about the inadequacy of New Orleans's flood defences, saw its budget requests slashed as well.
So part of the federal government's problem is populist myopia: the US system is quick to commit $60bn after a crisis, but slow to invest a few billion to avert one. And even when congress does profess an interest in prevention, it cannot resist tinkering for political advantage. The $2.5bn homeland security grant programme established by the 2001 Patriot Act has allocated money for the past three years without any regard to the actual risks faced by each state. Per capita, Montana and North Dakota fare better than more vulnerable New York. The Army Corps of Engineers has been subject to similar pressure to divert scarce funds to politically advantageous projects.
American ambivalence about federal power is also reflected in the practice of filling critical positions within the bureaucracy with political appointees. Michael Brown, the hapless head of Fema, finally resigned. But five other top Fema jobs have been filled by political activists. "We're always trying to strike the right balance" between political appointees and career civil servants, said Dick Cheney, as controversy over Brown's performance mounted. But the long-term trend runs only one way: the number of political appointees in the federal bureaucracy has ballooned over the last four decades. Harvard professor Roger Porter said in 2001 that the trend is partly due to the need to reward supporters as presidential campaigns become increasingly long and expensive. Allbaugh and Brown are typical.
The reputation of civilian agencies engaged in emergency response was badly damaged by the August storm. The military, by contrast, fared well. New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin praised Russel Honoré, heading the deployment of National Guard troops, as a "John Wayne dude that can get some stuff done." Other observers suggest that national emergency response plans should be changed to give the military a more prominent role in disaster management.
While trust in federal officials has declined sharply over the past four decades, trust in the military has increased, so that by 2001 two thirds of Americans said they put "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of trust in its leadership. Polls also show that Americans are far less likely to believe that the military—unlike the federal government generally—has too much power.
Militarism, it is even suggested, has become the only politically viable form of American statism. One consequence is that the military has accumulated functions that other components of the federal bureaucracy cannot perform, either for lack of resources or legitimacy. Abroad, says Dana Priest, its leaders are "pro-consuls to the empire," with resources for diplomacy unmatched by the state department. The US military, she adds, has moved into anti-drug trafficking, disarmament, mine clearance and foreign disaster relief. In Iraq and Afghanistan it guides nation-building.
Now it may gain new profile in domestic emergency response. Clearly this would require a reconsideration of the rules that have traditionally determined when and how military forces can be deployed within the US's own borders. And it may generate its own paradoxes. A polity typified by its distrust of the state may turn, in the end, to the one component of government that is least subject to the constraints of democratic politics.
