Remember the faux news conference put on by FEMA last month to brief about the response to the California wildfires? The “internal investigation” is complete, and some people have fallen under the bus.

Apparently, some poor decisions were taken in deciding to hold a news conference at short notice, then, when reporters could not make it in time, have agency communications staff substitute for reporters by lobbing questions at the Deputy Administrator.

“Much like in an airline crash or automobile accident that was reconstructed, there were several different points leading up to the press conference where, had a single decision been made differently, the event itself could have been averted,” [DHS spokesperson Russ] Knocke said Thursday (AP, via TPM)

FEMA’s press secretary at the time now works for a public relations agency in Utah (For those of you keeping track at home, that Washington to Utah in two weeks). The Director of Communications had been scheduled to take up a new job with Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Needless to say, that job fell through.

There’s a couple of hints in the AP story that the FEMA staffers fell victim, in part, to a predetermined PR strategy and poor communications between the press shops at FEMA and DHS:

• DHS had asked the agency to hold a press conference before the DHS Secretary and the FEMA Administrator landed in California that day; and
• FEMA’s press secretary had sent an email to his boss and the DHS official responsible for communications, asking for more time - but only 43 minutes before the scheduled start of the news conference.

There’s a swipe at the civil servants involved in the Washington Post coverage:

“[FEMA Administrator] Paulison said he did not expect additional disciplinary action but would reorganize and retrain the agency’s 90-member external affairs staff.

“Those are career people. They should have stepped up and said something, they really should have. But their bosses said ‘Do this,’ and they did it — some reluctantly, but there’s no excuses for that,” Paulison said. He called the impact on FEMA’s credibility “devastating.”

Really? Is that sort of independent action possible when the upper ranks of the administration are staffed by partisan appointees?

I’d be really interested to know.

Technorati Tags: FEMA, puppet theatre, DHS