The Mike Brown Saga Deepens

Paul Campos has an article in the New Republic (registration required, but available on bugmenot) about FEMA director Mike Brown. I've written before, as have many others, about Brown's complete lack of qualifications for that position, which he got only because his former college roommate hired him as his assistant. But Campos reveals that, if anything, we've been too charitable to him:

To understand the Mike Brown saga, one has to know something about the intricacies of the legal profession, beginning with the status of the law school he attended. Brown's biography on fema's website reports that he's a graduate of the Oklahoma City University School of Law. This is not, to put it charitably, a well-known institution. For example, I've been a law professor for the past 15 years and have never heard of it. Of more relevance is the fact that, until 2003, the school was not even a member of the Association of American Law Schools (aals)--the organization that, along with the American Bar Association, accredits the nation's law schools. Most prospective law students won't even consider applying to a non-aals law school unless they have no other option, because many employers have a policy of not considering graduates of non-aals institutions. So it's fair to say that Brown embarked on his prospective legal career from the bottom of the profession's hierarchy.

So what did Brown, who received his J.D. in 1981, do with his non-aals law degree? In 1985, Brown joined the firm of Long, Ford, Lester & Brown in Enid, Oklahoma. When I spoke to one of its former members, Andrew Lester (the firm no longer exists), he recalled that Brown was with the firm for only "about 18 months." Lester, who is a longtime friend of Brown, believes that Brown spent most of his time in the first few years after law school pursuing his own legal practice and representing the interests of a prominent local family. Lester vigorously defended his friend's overall abilities, as well as his qualifications for the fema directorship, pointing out that fema had dealt with more than 100 federal emergencies during Brown's tenure. In any case, despite the claim of Brown's fema biography that he practiced law for 20 years prior to his 2001 appointment as fema's general counsel, it appears that, by 1987, he had already more or less abandoned his nascent legal career. From 1987 to 1990, Brown's resumé includes being the sacrificial lamb for the Oklahoma Republican Party in a 1988 congressional election, in which he won 27 percent of the vote against the incumbent Democrat, and stints as an assistant city manager and city councilman in Edmond, Oklahoma. (According to fema, because of these positions, "Mike Brown has a lot of experience managing people.") By 1991, he had moved to Colorado, where he became commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association (iaha). This position, which never made his fema bio, was Brown's full-time job from 1991 to 2001, and it had nothing to do with the practice of law.

And as Time magazine is reporting, his claim that he was an "assistant city manager" for Edmond, Oklahoma turns out to be false as well. In point of fact he was an "assistant to the city manager", which an Edmond city spokesperson said was roughly the equivalant of an internship. And in addition to the horse association, his full time job, not being listed in his FEMA bio, what he did list as his job all that time doesn't appear to have been the case at all:

What, then, are we to make of the claim in Brown's fema biography that, prior to joining the Agency, he had spent most of his professional career practicing law in Colorado? Normally, an attorney practicing law in a state for ten years would have left a record of his experience in public documents. But just about the only evidence of Brown's Colorado legal career is the Web page he submitted to Findlaw.com, an Internet site for people seeking legal representation. There, he lists himself as a member of the "International Arabian Horse Association Legal Dept." and claims to be competent to practice law across a dizzying spectrum of specialties--estate planning, family law, employment law for both plaintiffs and defendants, real-estate law, sports law, labor law, and legislative practice. With all this expertise, it's all the more striking that one can't find any other evidence of Brown's legal career in Colorado...

When Brown left the iaha four years ago, he was, among other things, a failed former lawyer--a man with a 20-year-old degree from a semi-accredited law school who hadn't attempted to practice law in a serious way in nearly 15 years and who had just been forced out of his job in the wake of charges of impropriety. At this point in his life, returning to his long-abandoned legal career would have been very difficult in the competitive Colorado legal market. Yet, within months of leaving the iaha, he was handed one of the top legal positions in the entire federal government: general counsel for a major federal agency. A year later, he was made its number-two official, and, a year after that, Bush appointed him director of fema.

It's bad enough when attorneys are named to government jobs for which their careers, no matter how distinguished, don't qualify them. But Brown wasn't a distinguished lawyer: He was hardly a lawyer at all. When he left the iaha, he was a 47-year-old with a very thin resumé and no job. Yet he was also what's known in the Mafia as a "connected guy." That such a person could end up in one of the federal government's most important positions tells you all you need to know about how the Bush administration works--or, rather, doesn't.

To be fair, the last statement isn't necessarily unique to the Bush administration. Every administration hands out jobs to campaign workers, advance people, and so forth. Big donors get ambassadorships to some insignificant nation, campaign counsels get a cushy job as the deputy assistant undersecretary in charge of doing very little in some agency. Most political appointees frankly do nothing of any use. But FEMA is an agency that actually does something and its job is a damned important one after disasters. You'd think that we would want a director to at least have some experience in emergency services. Not only does Brown have none, but virtually none of the top people at the top of FEMA have any experience that would qualify them for their positions.

Clinton's FEMA director, James Lee Witt, had years of experience heading up Arkansas' emergency services. And according to a 1995 Washington Monthly article, he did a great deal to reform FEMA, bringing in qualified people underneath him and turning FEMA from one of the worst federal agencies to one of the best and most professional. That appears to have ended now.

Bush's first appointment as FEMA director, Joe Allbaugh, had been his chief of staff when he was governor of Texas. After serving less than 2 years as FEMA director, he resigned and started a consulting firm for companies seeking contracts for reconstruction of Iraq - 4 months before the war in Iraq actually started. And early this year, he filed as a registered lobbyist for - guess who? - Haliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root.

This is pretty typical government stuff. Political insider gets cushy job, sits in it for a couple years doing very little, quits and becomes a consultant/lobbyist selling influence based on his name and connections in DC. It goes on all the time, regardless of political party. It's not by coincidence that you'll find virtually every former cabinet secretary still alive on the boards of directors of multiple corporations that do business with the agency they used to be in charge of. It's because they have prestige and connections and know how to get contracts and favorable administrative interpretations of various regulations that affect those companies.

But the fact is that FEMA had finally turned around and become a reasonably efficent and effective disaster response agency in the 90s. Events like the MIdwestern floods of 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 were handled with efficency and speed and won high praise from state disaster officials. And that has now been destroyed by cronyism that resulted in completely unqualified people being put in charge. Indeed, as Campos' article points out, it's hard to figure out what exactly Mike Brown would be qualified to do.

Solutions? Good question. Some argue that FEMA should not exist at all, that by covering up the costs of living in high risk areas (by paying those who live there to rebuild when disaster hits) they encourage people to live in areas they shouldn't live in, particularly in ways that damage the environment and make disasters more, well, disasterous. In the wake of Katrina, that's not an unreasonable argument. I think we've got similar problems either way we go. People aren't just going to move out of places they've lived all their lives; it's just not human nature, even if they know the risk. The state of Florida and all of the east coast and gulf coast is prone to hurricanes, the west coast is prone to earthquakes, the entire Mississippi River plains are prone to flooding as is any major river valley. Moving everyone out of those areas at this late date isn't really practical.

And here's my overall point: if we're going to have a FEMA, it operates essentially like a fire department for the Federal government. A fire department is not a political agency, we don't name fire chiefs that aren't actual firefighters just because they were frat brothers with the mayor. We employ fire chiefs, and fire fighters, based on their expertise and their training. Why should FEMA be run by political appointees in the first place? And on a larger scale, we need to begin shrinking the size of government and a good place to start would be eliminating a whole lot of those cushy do-nothing jobs in which political appointees are placed. It is an enormous waste of our tax dollars used almost exclusively to pay back favors.