Two Bush 2000 Florida recount aides were rewarded with top FEMA posts

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Two Bush 2000 Florida recount aides were rewarded with top FEMA posts

 

Reversing an eight-year crusade to rid the now-embattled Federal

Emegency Management Agency of political patronage, a newly elected

George W. Bush in 2001 named two key players in his Florida recount

fight to important FEMA posts.

 

Neither man, Jacksonville attorney Reynold Hoover (pictured at left)

and Miami lawyer Mark Wallace, had any experience in emergency

management before they were named by the Bush administration to FEMA,

now under fire for its botched response to Hurricane Katrina.

 

Hoover, a longtime " explosives expert " with the U.S. Bureau of

Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who became a lawyer in 1996, is still

with FEMA as its director of national security coordination. Wallace

left the Bush administration in 2004 to become deputy manager of the

president's re-election campaign, and is now a lobbyist.

 

They are two more names to add to the list of political appointees and

out-and-out hacks at FEMA. Many are calling for the firing of agency

chief Michael Brown, the ousted head of a horse association who was

hired at FEMA in 2001 along with his college roommate, top Bush

advisor Joe Allbaugh. And it was reported yesterday that FEMA's No. 2

and No. 3 officials, Patrick Rhode and Scott Morris, are also former

campaign aides.

 

Consider this quote:

 

" FEMA is widely viewed as a 'dumping ground,' a turkey farm, if you

will, where large numbers of positions exist that can be conveniently

and quietly filled by political appointment, " the preliminary report

said. " This has led to a situation where top officials, having little

or no experience in disaster or emergency management, are creating

substantial morale problems among careerists and professionals. "

 

Appropriate in the wake of the agency's bungled efforts over the last

10 days in Louisiana and Mississippi? Yes -- but the above quote is

from 1992, during the administration of George H.W. Bush. It came from

a preliminary report from the staff of the House Appropriations

Committee, and it was written before FEMA came under fire that year

for a tardy response to Florida's Hurricane Andrew. (Note: Any article

not linked came from the Nexis search engine.)

 

The Andrew debacle was one of many factors in the first President

Bush's failed re-election bid. They say that good government is good

politics, and so when Bill Clinton arrived at the White House in 1993,

he made a serious effort to rid FEMA of political hackery.

 

Clinton hired a professional, James Lee Witt, to run the agency and

that May Witt told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, according to

a Washington Post article, " that FEMA 'will not be doing business as

usual' and that he was committed to making his organization 'one of

the most respected agencies in this nation.'

 

Did he succeed? Here's what the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote in

a January 1996 editorial:

 

FEMA has developed a sterling reputation for delivering disaster-

relief services, a far cry from its abysmal standing before James Lee

Witt took its helm in 1993.

 

How did Witt turn FEMA around so quickly? Well, he is the first

director of the agency to have emergency-management experience. He

stopped the staffing of the agency by political patronage. He removed

layers of bureaucracy. Most important, he instilled in the agency a

spirit of preparedness, of service to the customer, of willingness to

listen to ideas of local and state officials to make the system work

better.

 

But if Clinton and Witt stopped the staffing of FEMA by political

patronage, George W. Bush re-started it within days of taking the oath

of office -- rewarding some of the people who'd helped him become

president in the grueling 2000 Florida recount.

 

One of those was Wallace (pictured at left) -- a young lawyer who,

according to a July 14, 2002, article by the Miami Herald's Carol

Rosenberg -- " fought on behalf of the GOP in Palm Beach County during

the butterfly ballot brouhaha. " He was hired in 2001 as FEMA's general

counsel and was the chief lawyer for the agency on its Sept. 11

recovery effort. After his 2004 stint as a top official in the Bush

campaign, he was hired in March as a D.C. lobbyist for a Florida-based

law firm, Akerman Senterfitt.

 

Hoover, the former ATF agent turned attorney, was active in the Duval

County GOP at the time of the Florida recount, and because a point man

in the Jacksonville area. He initially served as FEMA's chief of staff

for a time, but he's currently listed on the agency's organizational

chart as director of the Office of National Security Coordination.

 

Of course, we all know that Bush has rewarded a number of people who

went to bat for him in Florida in 2000 with plum jobs. One of those is

his new UN ambassador John Bolton, who -- as the Herald article

reminds us -- " [burst] into a Tallahassee library on behalf of the

Bush-Cheney campaign to stop a recount of Miami-Dade County ballots. "

Another was recently picked by Bush to become chief justice of the

U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts.

 

What's more, Wallace and Hoover -- and Brown and Rhodes and Morris --

aren't the only political hires at FEMA. Indeed, the officials tasked

with the response to Hurricane Katrina -- Dan Craig, the director of

the recovery division -- is another. As his bio notes, " Craig worked

as a campaign advisor, and political fundraiser and research analyst "

and was also a lobbyist. At the risk of stating the obvious by this

point, he did not have emergency management experience.

 

He was the key player in a 2004 FEMA controversy that may get some new

scrutiny in light of recent events. From a May 15, 2005, Knight-Ridder

article:

 

As Hurricane Frances made landfall 100 miles north of Miami-Dade

County in September, a top official at the Federal Emergency

Management Agency declared the county a major disaster area with no

evidence of damage and contrary to a presidential order, federal

auditors have found.

 

That decision allowed more than 12,000 Miami-Dade residents, many with

minimal or no damage, to collect $31 million and brought unprecedented

scrutiny to the federal disaster aid program...

 

On Sept. 5, as the storm continued its trek into central Florida, FEMA

added to the declaration Miami-Dade and the other 12 counties

originally requested by Gov. Jeb Bush. The decision was made by FEMA's

recovery division director in Washington. The report did not name him,

but Nicol D. Andrews, FEMA spokeswoman, identified him as Dan Craig.

 

The ruling came just two months before the 2004 presidential election,

with Florida the top battleground state.

 

Also in 2004, up the Gulf Coast, FEMA was involved in a mock drill

called Hurricane Pam, in which a hurricane with 120 mph winds topped

the levies of New Orleans. FEMA's chief representative at the drill

was its regional director at the time, Ron Castleman.

 

" We made great progress this week in our preparedness efforts, " said

Ron Castleman, FEMA Regional Director. " Disaster response teams

developed action plans in critical areas such as search and rescue,

medical care, sheltering, temporary housing, school restoration and

debris management. These plans are essential for quick response to a

hurricane but will also help in other emergencies. "

 

When the very real Hurricane Katrina struck last month, Castleman had

already moved on to a job in the private sector. Would his presence

have helped? We don't know.

 

We can only tell you Castleman's immediate job before he became FEMA's

top person in the Gulf region. He had been the chief administrative

officer -- for the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign.

 

 

 

Posted on September 7, 2005 11:19 AM