Last month I wrote about the importance of emergency managers understanding and being involved in their local political process. However, that’s only part of the issue. Local and state politics are more immediate but national politics can have long range implications for local emergency management programs. While an emergency manager will naturally be more focused on local political issues, it is critical that they also be cognizant of what is happening at the national level.
To understand why participation in national politics is important, we need to understand that our current emergency management system is not the product of intelligent design. Instead it is a collection of programs and directives resulting from legislation driven by what sociologists refer to as “focusing events.” A focusing event is a disaster that is so serious in its consequences that it creates sufficient public concern to force politicians to make changes to policies and laws. In other words, bad things happen and public outrage forces politicians to react, or in many cases, overreact.
In 2007, sociologists Claire Rubin and Irmak Renda-Tanali and attorney William Cumming prepared a series of disaster time lines that charted major focusing events and their outcomes. The timelines show the events, significant reports on consequences, directives and statutes developed as a result, and actions taken by the federal government. The timelines are a brilliant illustration of how our emergency management system has developed through reaction to events rather than through careful risk analysis and strategy development.
Unfortunately, public concern and elite panic have often produced an overreaction to focusing events. The most glaring example of overreaction in recent history was the fallout from the September 11th where the policy of fighting terrorists outside the continental United States was implemented at the expense of increasing resilience within the US infrastructure and strengthening emergency management capabilities. The result was the debacle of Hurricane Katrina.
A second reason why national politics should be on an emergency manager’s radar is the disruption to plans and policies following a Presidential election. Key positions, such as that of the FEMA Administrator, are political appointments and change at the whim of the new President. Policies, directives and budgets and even reporting lines can change. During the Clinton administration, the FEMA director was part of the President’s Cabinet, in the Bush administration that followed, the director reported to the Secretary of Homeland Security rather than directly to the President. Of more concern is that changes in administration can result in policy changes driven by politics. President G.W. Bush’s FEMA director cancelled the poplar Project Impact program that provided minimal seed money to increase community resilience and proposed cuts to the National Flood Insurance Program.
Politics also play out in disaster declarations. We sometimes forget that disaster declarations are discretionary. A request is not automatically granted but is at the discretion of the President. In a 2003 study of disaster payments, researchers Thomas Garrett and Russell Sobel found that states politically important to the President had higher rates of declarations and that the mean level of declarations tended to be higher in certain election years than in non-election years. A similar study by researcher Andrew Reeves in 2007 found, “a highly competitive state can expect to receive over 60% more presidential disaster declarations than an uncompetitive state …these decisions have the intended electoral benefits… A president can expect a 1.7% increase in a statewide contest in return for a single presidential disaster declaration.”
What can a local emergency manager do? Clearly, with the demands of the job, national politics are the last thing on your mind. But there are things you could and should do:
- Educate yourself on the political process. A good place to start is Richard Sylves excellent book, Disaster Policy and Politics: Emergency Management and Homeland Security.
- Get to know your local congressional staff. Remember that politicians rely on their staff to help them formulate positions on legislation. Building a good relationship with a congressional staff person may well be more useful to you than a brief meeting with a politician.
- Know your local government’s process for lobbying federal representatives and taking official positions on legislation.
- Support the International Association of Emergency Managers. IAEM monitors national legislation so you don’t have to and lobbies for emergency management interests on proposed bills. They have successfully fended off significant cuts to emergency management funding and work hard to educate congressional staff on emergency management issues.
- Make use of your local constituency: volunteer organizations, community groups, professional associations. A handful of personalized messages from local community members carry more weight than a score of copied email messages or preprinted postcards,
Emergency managers tend to avoid politics and rightly so. Otto von Bismarck is famously quoted as saying, “Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made.” Unfortunately, we need to ensure that our positions are heard on legislation that affects us. Politics is a numbers game, and we need to make sure we’re counted.
