A dubious resume

As calls increase for FEMA chief's ouster, new doubts come to light about where he did, and didn't, work

BY CRAIG GORDON AND DANIEL WAGNER | WASHINGTON BUREAU

September 9, 2005

WASHINGTON - New questions surfaced yesterday about whether the White House inflated FEMA chief Michael Brown's past work experience when he took over the agency, where several of the most senior managers bring little or no disaster-response experience to their posts, including Brown.

The official White House announcement of Brown's nomination to head FEMA in January 2003 lists his previous experience as "the Executive Director of the Independent Electrical Contractors," a trade group based in Alexandria, Va.

But two officials of the group told Newsday this week that Brown, in fact, never was the national head of the group but did serve as the executive director of a regional chapter, based in Colorado, where Brown has lived.

And, Brown's immediate successor as the Rocky Mountain executive director, Terry Moreland, recalled that Brown held the job for less than six weeks before becoming FEMA general counsel in 2001.

Upon learning that the 2003 press release on the White House Web site states that Brown was the IEC executive director, the group's current top administrator, Larry Mullins asked, "Do you think I could get that taken down?" and said he planned to call the White House to have it removed.

At the same time, the January 2003 White House press release on Brown's nomination dropped any reference to Brown's main job prior to joining FEMA in 2001 - a decade-long stint with the International Arabian Horse Association.

FEMA spokesman Mark Pfeifle said last night that documents Brown provided to the White House stated that he was the interim director of the group in Colorado but "when it was written up in the public release, it did not contain that portion." Pfeifle did not know why, and the White House did not immediately return calls for comment.

With calls growing for his ouster, Brown's post with the Arabian horse association has come under much ridicule in the days since Hurricane Katrina. Brown's critics among Democrats have cited it as further proof that he lacked any significant qualifications to run the nation's disaster-response agency. The Denver Post reported that Brown resigned after group members questioned his handling of a $50,000 gift.

Brown is a Republican lawyer who is a longtime friend of former FEMA chief Joe Allbaugh, who himself took over after serving as President George W. Bush's campaign manager in 2000. Brown's only previous emergency experience was as an assistant city manager in the 1970s in Edmond, Okla., whose population in 2000 was 68,315, overseeing emergency services.

But Brown is not the only member of FEMA's top management team who comes to the job with ties to the Bush administration but little or no hands-on emergency response experience, according to official FEMA bios.

Brown's No. 2 aide, Patrick Rhode, is a former Bush campaign staffer who later worked on the White House advance staff, which coordinates presidential appearances.

Scott Morris, FEMA's former deputy chief of staff and now head of its Florida hurricane-recovery office, also worked on the 2000 Bush campaign in Austin as a media strategist.

Daniel Craig, who took over FEMA's recovery division in 2003, was a regional official for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and active in Republican politics in Connecticut.

And FEMA's No. 3 official, Brooks Altshuler, previously also worked on the White House advance team.

Vice President Dick Cheney defended FEMA on a tour of the region, saying he believes that the Bush administration managed to "strike the right balance" between political appointees and career professionals to oversee the relief efforts.

FEMA long has had a reputation of being a political dumping ground - though former Clinton administration FEMA chief James Lee Witt generally won good marks for trying to bring more professionals into the agency. Now former FEMA union chief Pleasant Mann charges: "If you look at most of the people down [from the top], it takes you quite a ways before you find someone who got here because of emergency management experience."