Asymmetrical Information

Answer: Bald-faced, cricle jerk, cronyism...well maybe common incompetence, but my money is on the former.

I disagree that it was intentional. I sincerely doubt the Bush administration cared about this guy enough to take on the political risk of appointing him with a padded resume.

"I sincerely doubt the Bush administration cared about this guy enough to take on the political risk of appointing him with a padded resume."

The sad thing is that I think they didn't care enough about the job at FEMA to be worried about whether this guy had any relevant qualifications

P.S. Jane - your spam filter doesn't seem to like email addresses with numerals in them

Same with me, Dan.

Someone find me an administration that didn't hire its share of hacks, ostensibly qualifed or otherwise. Does anyone recall the Democratic nutcase that chaired the Civil Rights Commission not too long ago? This is a bipartisan failing and will ever be thus.

I think the security screen, while deep, is probably rather single-tracked. Are you a criminal, do you have ties to subversive groups, are you insane, do you have lifestyle habits which can make you the subject of blackmail, etc.

They probably don't check for political writings (blogs), academic dishonesty, sloth in job performance, that sort of thing. Given the number of investigations they have to do, that's probably a good thing, too.

Exactly MAC, cronyism is as ancient as whoring.

The distinction here is that this is the administration that said 911 changed everything, this is the security-oriented administration,this is the administration that has invaded two foreign countries in pursuit of obtaining that security and it can not get a qualified person in charge of FEMA.

It would seem that this would be of the utmost importance to the Bush Administration. No?

Was one done? If it was done, was it thorough? If it was thorough, does it contradict the picture being painted of poor Brownie? If it does why is it not being waved around on the Scarborough program saying how qualified he really is? If it doesn't contradict, who ignored the lousy qualifications? Lieberman, the Pres?

It just piles up and soon the only thing you can see is intentional cronyism, if not by the Pres then by Allbaugh.

Some years ago, I had a next door neighbor who worked for Fed Gov't. I had said "hi" to the guy and spoken with him a few times, that is it. He was not a friend and he did not use me as a reference.

Well one day a Fed shows up (want to say a U.S. Marshall, but might have been a FBI agent). Anyway the badge is flashed and she is asking me about wild parties, drugs, etc. This guy is a minor flunky compared to Brownie!

That this was not intentional is incredulous to me when they go to that much trouble to vett my neighbor and they can not discern that Brownie fudged his resume'. Sheesh.

When my son, a Marine, was being vetted for a certain security clearance, the FEEBs called a soccer coach he had known for 45 days.

This coach called me, concerned about the Feds attention to a kid he barely recalled. Good on him.

I heard from several neighbors as well. They did not know my son well and couldn't figure it out. Seemed to them like he might be in DS.

When I mentioned this to my son, he couldn't even remember the coach's name, and certainly never referenced the neighbors he couldn't remember either.

It did seem thorough. It now seems like BS.

Apparently there is quite a different standard for being the head of FEMA.

A friend of the family applied to be a gov't translator during the Clinton administration. Two FBI agents interviewed my father. His favorite questions:

"Were you aware that at one time she was a citizen of a fascist nation?" - "Yes, she was born in Portugal. Which was a fascist nation friendly with the USA."

"Does she have any acquaintances whom you would describe as leftist?" [!] - "Yes. Me."

The questions seemed so bizarrely offpoint that we assumed they just had a routine checklist of things to ask about, rather than tailoring the investigation to the individual sitation; clearly these checklists don't include in-depth research into work history.

I doubt the FBI searches to see if you padded your resume. They are probably more interested in seeing whether you've ever given speeches at UC Berkeley in support of the Shining Path, donated money to Hamas, etc. This is more of a concern with low-level people who nobody has ever heard of. If someone is already of sufficient status to receive an appointment directly from the President, maybe these kinds of background searches are still carried out, but more likely I would think they consider him/her already sufficiently vetted.

"So...how long have you known this 'General' Powell". ;)

I am confused by Jane's surprise. Did we not just go through this with Kerik? And before that and potentially more significantly with appointess to the CPA in Iraq?

I have to say I strongly disagree with the attitude expresssed above by Mckinneytexas. Some countries have more and some countries have less corruption / cronyism. Let me suggest that a lacksidasical attitude towards it is a contributing factor to its growth. The appropriate response to a common problem is to condemn it everywhere rather than shrug.

Tom

Jane... I once worked with a private background screening company on a futuristic IT system. Pre-employment background screening is mostly limited to verifying dates of employment (work) or enrollment (school), degrees, positions, etc. Simple, verifiable facts. This is because employers and schools don't want to assume any liability for slandering someone. Even when character witlesses are listed, these are handled by calling and verifying that they know the person. Period. The mistaken "assistant" vs. "assistant to" seems to me like a detail that could easily get misunderstood in a background check, and really, if you know anyone who works for a big bank (e.g. Wells Fargo), they are probably an assistant vice president! Maybe when the FBI comes calling, the HR person is just supposed to forget her obligations to her school or company and spill all the available dirt. But I doubt it.

Well, the truth is, as I understand it, that pretty much every
federal agency is led by a politician or a politician's friend.
This has always been the case. I think it has been the case
in every administration in my lifetime. The individuals in question
rarely have any special expertise in whatever it is the agency does,
well except for general management skills which sometimes they do have,
and even if they do have special expertise in the agency that's
not really why they are there.

They are there to represent the party in power, in particular
the president. This is one of the main avenues by which the
people's wishes are reflected, supposedly. If we had experts
in charge then agency policies wouldn't change from administration
to administration and elections would become even more superficial
than they already are.

In fact the political appointee's power base is his or her
connection with the White House -- the stronger that connection
the greater the authority over the agency.

Of course even with a change in the party in power and
a change in the boss agency policies don't change that
much, usually. There are lots of ways to not do what you're told,
especially if you are a federal employee who's nearly immune
from being fired or demoted. Or to nominally do what you're told
but fail in practice. It takes special skills and usually
a lot of time to move a federal bureaucracy in a direction it
doesn't want to go. Few political appointees have them and
this is what is actually required to improve an agency.

I find it hard to believe that Bush's political appointees
single-handedly sabotaged the efforts of FEMA. My guess is
that they were, with a few exceptions, following the plan
FEMA already had in place for such things, and that their
failure was really an inability to change the plan in an
effective way as events deviated from what was expected.

Maybe the resume he gave when he was first being appointed wasn't padded. All of the exaggerations I've seen are taken from his "official biography", which is presumably put together by in-house PR folks at FEMA.

See http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_09/007093.php

The purpose of the security clearance process is not to determine whther or not someone is suitable for their job, it's to determine if they will pose a security risk. That's it. It used to focus on ties to subverisve groups. Now it keys more on financial problems and other exploitable vulnerabilites, which may or not include lifestyle issues, depending on secretive the person being checked is.

The right answer was in the commnet saying that the administration thought so little of the position, not that they thought so much of Brown. The rest of this is the way they subordinated the agency to DHS, cut its funding, narrowed its focus to terrorism, etc.

Jane, I think I have your answer. The FBI background check was thorough enough to find out everything we now know. But no one in the White House personnel operation cared, any more than they cared that the folks recruited off the Heritage Foundation website to run the CPA in Iraq didn't speak Arabic, didn't know anything about Iraq, and had no experience in public administration, budgeting, contracting, or construction.

What Mark said. Or, to put it slightly differently: government background checks are supposed to verify that you don't have a criminal record or other such irregularities, that you lived where you said you did and that you were employed as you said you had been (at least, that was my experience, and I'm only a _paralegal_). We know that Brown falsified his resume and was not considered qualified for his position by past employers. Is there any possible way that the background check would _not_ have picked this up? And if the background check did pick it up, is there any conclusion to be drawn that differs from Mark's, given above?

"""
The rest of this is the way they subordinated the agency to DHS, cut its funding, narrowed its focus to terrorism, etc.
"""

It was the Democrats (Lieberman et. al.) who wanted FEMA stuck under DHS, and Bush gave in (Shame on you Bush for giving the democrats what they want!) eventually. Once it was under DHS it was obvious that FEMA was going to worry more about man-made than nature-caused problems, as that is what it's parent organization's mission is.

Of course 1) FEMA has always had it's head up it's warm dank hole, 2) Always been slow, and 3) this is about hte fastest it's ever responded to something of this nature.

Brown's problems are 1) He's a Bush appointee. 2) He's either a complete idiot, or his PR advisor is a democrat. 3) He happened to be in office when the hurricane hit.

Brown has disaster experience. He managed four hurricane relief efforts in Florida last year and you never heard his name.

The difference this year is primarily the incompetance of the local government. Both Blanco and Nagin did not have a clue on how to manage preparations or aftermath.

I stand corrected. No one could possibly have anticipated that Brownie was unqualified for one of the most important jobs in the current administration.

I worked on a contract at the National Gallery in London quite a few years back, but before I was allowed backstage, as it were, I was fully security-checked, presumably to find out if I had stolen any fine art in my recent past!

All well and good, you may opine, but what would your comment be when I discovered that a full thirty-five percent of the main SECURITY systems were disabled at any one time becasue they were either faulty, or just not working!

Reference checks on personnel are fine, but when the outfit who is doing the checking can't even fix the systems supposed to be protecting the goodies, what hope is there for the checkers?
If you swap Mississippi for the National Gallery, and swap the fact that an so-called environmental pressure group had succesfully sued the U.S. army Corps of Engineers to make them abandon work based on a environmental impact statement, for the Gallery's security systems,as in http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19418 the reader may discover that there are no easy answers to the question originally posed by your posting! The guy may have padded his C.V., but if the area he is supposed to be getting ready to relieve is suffering from self-inflicted injuries, who really is to blame?

Look, it it doesn't have to be a partisan swipe to say "Cronyism is bad. Stop it!"

Yes, democrats do it to. Yes, everybody has done it all through history.

So what?

It's still bad, and we should do whatever we can to minimize it.

Mark: You keep assuming that the point of a security clearance check, which is what an "FBI background check" is, is to check someone's resume or ask "was he qualified to do his job with you?".

How the latter question is actually relevant to the security check is left unstated, and I can't figure it out on my own. Care to tell us how that's supposed to work, given that people have already posted comments from their own direct experiences with FBI checks, and not mentioned any inquiries into job competence or their resumes?

Actually, the security checks for government employees are much more rigorous than they are for political appointees (natch), who are completely exempt from a lot of the requirements regular government employees have to go through. It's erroneous to assume they don't check your resume. That IS very much a part of the high-level background checks, and they have your former employers fill out lengthy surveys as to what kinds of work you did for them, and they check that against your resume. It's a pretty thorough system.

However, as I just said, political appointees are exempt, so it never would have caught Brown at all.

Because PR flacks doing the website "assumed" some things that weren't. CNN/Time then "ASSUME" that Brownie put that information on the site and attributed the padding to him. He later told the AP that's what happened in a VERY angry tone.

My wife is a high school art teacher in a very small town in south carolina. The Feds came last week and talked to *just* her about some young man who is getting a security clearance. They go pretty deep. It looks bad for Bush. But I dont think it will be a long lasting blow. The recovery is going well. NO is under control and slowly being dried out and cleaned up. All along the coast from NO to Mobile we have cops from all over the country and plenty of troops and-at least from all the shots of the media being hauled around in them- duce and a halfs.
The real story now is watching the democratic mayor and gov. answer for their very public failures of leadership.
Bush is gets a pass. besides, why should he care? He is not running for president next time. If the Dems could come up with a real centrist (I'm talking to your HRC!) they would have a shot. But they have to be better on Iraq or it is not go and we will have to see what Nader will have to say. NOT!

When I was in college 30 years ago, FEMA was known to be a dumping ground for hacks who couldn't be relied on to carry out really important work. I know there were efforts at reform in both the first Bush Admin and under Clinton (Gore was really into the good government stuff), but I guess old habits die hard.

Still, I feel awfully sorry for anyone who is being made the goat for a fubar that was clearly the work of many. That he was replaced by a coast Guard Admiral to handle the crisis suggests that leadership does make a difference.

Moreover, we have learned a valuable lesson: That we do not have an effective system for evacuating a mid-sized city. Given increasingly violent weather patterns, and increasingly violent politics, this is a procedure it would behoove us to master. And practice.

Questions we should address now: What's the best way of dealing with people who don't want to go because they distrust authority/lead narrow. ignorant lives/or are sick, elderly, disabled, incontinent and scared? What are the limits of humane social obligation?

How large a tax increase are we willing to stomache to effectuate fast evacuation plans?

Do we need to have a million or so extra rooms on tap to house the potentially dis-housed, possibly for months or years?

What's the prime objective in the event of a mass-casualty terror attack like 9/11? Is it to empty the city out or to lock it down (as was done in New York, to no real purpose).

The Time story appears to be baloney. The Rocky Mountain News has a story up showing that he did indeed have some emergency services experience back in Oklahoma, that he left the Arabian Horse Assoc. amicably, and that he naturally progressed from FEMA general counsel, to Deputy Director, to Director.

Here's a clarification from a woman who first claimed Brown overstated his work for Edmond OK:

'City spokeswoman Claudia Deakins told Time that Brown's job gave him no authority over other employees and that the assistant position "is more like an intern." She declined to comment Friday, but issued a clarification by e-mail saying she did not work for the city when Brown was there and that she could only speak about the city's current organization.'

As Vince Foster said, in DC destroying people is considered sport. The reality is that the death toll is about 1% of what the simulated 'Hurricane Pam' predicted. Somebody's responsible for saving thousands of lives, probably Michael Brown.

Even if the 'padding' story is true...
1. He probably didn't 'pad' anything he submitted for the background check.
2. The security gurus don't check resumes. I could, f'instance, post "Senior Maritime Advisor to the ubiquitous Jane Galt" on my resume; long's I didn't enter that on the security screening form, all I'd have to worry about is the wrath of Herself.

Jane,

On the subject of background investigations: My first job out of college was for a three-letter agency in a five sided building. About a month before graduation, my mom called to tell me the neighbor was in a panic. Apparently he called her and said "Mary Lou, the FBI's lookin' for your son! I didn't tell them nothing!"

Oh, and, my regular email address has a number in it, too...

Cronyism itself isn't the real problem, it's hiring cronies who can't even past a simple smell test. Yes, there are a lot of appointments and the president doesn't have the time to personally vet each one, but you'd think his high level cronies would have the self-interest to cover their asses when appointing the low level cronies.

(Of course, in this case we have the semi-competent, if that, Mr. Chertoff in charge of a bloated ill-defined bureacracy which includes FEMA. I'm surprised the latter even got someone as qualified as Brown. And lets not get in to the dodos in congress who rubber stamped the whole fiasco.

Now that I'm ranting; my beef is that Congress has completely and utterly failed in its responsibility to provide oversight not just of FEMA and Homeland security, but of all the other agencies especially the CIA, FBI and ATF.)

Part of the problem with background checks is that the Federal government makes them on all employees. I was hired by a VA medical center two years ago and was astonished to learn that the government performs background checks on every employee, from janitors to the medical center director. This is supposed to protect us from terrorists. However, the huge increase in background checks meant that they were 18 MONTHS behind. That's right, I could be a previously convicted terrorist felon, and I could work in a federal job for over a year before someone found out. Pathetic.

Exactly! All administrations are alike.

Which is why Bush allowed Brownie, exactly as qualified as James Lee Witt, to run FEMA.

And he did too have experience, which he got on the job last year.

Background checks for low level clearances are so behind that the feds have a backlog of 200,000 people to check out.

Really.

So everyone's memories of prior clearances might not be relevant these days..

I think vetting for security clearances must vary from position to position. My father has a security clearance of some sort or another, has worked with the FAA's computer systems both in and out of DC for over 15 years, and they've never called me or my sister to ask about him - which is fortunate for him, because he's an alcoholic, sex-addicted child molester, and I wouldn't have hesitated to tell them so.

Cronyism could be the reason. But who was Jeff Gannon/Guckert's crony and why wasn't any of his creds checked before he got into the white house as a "reporter"? I'd sure be interested to find the answer to that one as well. Cronyism. Ineptitism. Don'tcaresim. Letemeatcakeism. icandowhateveriwantandnoonecanstopmeism.

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