In Washington state, where Mullen is director of the Military Department’s Emergency Management Division, everything is under scrutiny: planning, training, mitigation and even response. Needless to say, funds are tight. “Something’s got to give. We are seeing people split many, many different ways,” said Mullen, who also is president of the National Emergency Management Association.
Mullen’s office has cut 11 emergency management professionals in the past three years and may cut two or three more in the coming months. Perhaps most frightening in the current fiscal environment is the prospect of losing even more emergency management talent. “When you have uncertainty about the budget, you can have some very talented people seeking other opportunities, just because they must have security for themselves and their families,” he said.
Yes, it’s that bad. After years of consecutive cuts, state and local authorities are taking a hit once again in 2012. Some say they are running out of room to maneuver.
Lump Sum Budget
Rather than break these out as line items, as in the past, Congress gave the whole amount to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano to dole out as she saw fit. Some say the structural change matters more than the specific numbers.
Some wish that different alternatives would have been selected for changing the grant funding models.
“I’d rather see the grants stay like they were, and then lower each grant if they need to,” said John “Rusty” Russell, director of the Huntsville-Madison County, Ala., Emergency Management Agency. “There would still be a level of bureaucracy, but at least the grants would still be targeted in ways we have been able to build on in the past.”
Making Cuts
Like it or not, the block-grant format is a reality at least for the current budget year, and however the numbers get split up, emergency managers ultimately will have less to work with.
Many say that the budget cuts of recent years already have forced emergency managers to pare back to where it hurts. Loathe to sacrifice operational readiness, they say the next to go will be the cross-jurisdiction training and cooperation that they have spent the past decade building up.
“One would hope that when faced with these constraints, the communities would pull together to fill each others’ gaps. What we are seeing is the opposite,” said Jack Herrmann, senior adviser and chief of public health preparedness programs for the National Association of County and City Health Officials.
“We are all doing less with less, so when any one sector sees the cut, it really means they may not have the bodies to send to coalition meetings,” he said. “They may not have the bodies to participate in collaborative planning. They may not have the technology to maintain or sustain that collaborative communication.”
A sharing of expertise and even of operational prowess among jurisdictions has been one of the big benefits of homeland security funding, and if it has to be scaled back, it’s going to hurt.
“The development of regional, local and state interactions in an organized and accountable way has made us much stronger,” Mullen said. He pointed to recent disasters in Alabama, Missouri and elsewhere in which response came quickly from across jurisdictional lines. At the Nevada air show catastrophe in September 2011, for instance, cross-training allowed leaders from outside jurisdictions to jump immediately into action. “Senior officers became monitors because that is what they knew how to do; other people did triage. That tells you we have developed a common language and some common understandings about how to work together.”
For many at the local level too, the ability to train, practice and plan together has become a way of life — one that could be jeopardized in this tight fiscal environment.
“We have a lot of regional committees of emergency that are all tied together,” said Hui-Shan Walker, emergency management coordinator for the Hampton, Va., Emergency Management Office and president of International Association of Emergency Managers-USA. “They meet monthly, and their decisions are made collaboratively.”
Filler said the grants have helped develop that all-important regional collaboration. “The regional collaborations that the grants have fostered, including the UASI program, are some of the most important things,” he said. “They have really smashed stovepipes, and it does take time and money to sustain these things.”
Bright Note
Collaboration may well be in peril, but the budget story is not entirely bleak. Congress struck a positive note with the Emergency Management Performance Grants (EMPG), boosting last year’s $340 million up a notch to $350 million. The survival of that line item comes as a relief to many in emergency management.
“All emergency managers are very, very grateful to Rep. Robert Aderholt [R-Ala.] for maintaining the EMPG and even securing an increase for that. That’s our bread and butter,” Russell said. He noted that the EMPG holds a special place, in that it calls for 50 percent matched funding between state and federal sources, thus formalizing a level of cooperation between the two levels of government.
The money helps pay for the fundamentals of emergency management, sometimes covering such essentials as phone bills and office supplies.
Despite such promising signs, the overall budget picture is less than encouraging for states that may be looking to the federal government to shore up their preparedness efforts. Still, it’s clear that at least some lawmakers do understand the link between being ready and funding readiness.
“Homeland security grants help our local first responders improve their effectiveness and serve as a force multiplier for federal resources. Reducing the funding for first responders could undermine our state and local partners who are the first on the scene when natural disasters and terrorist attacks strike,” said Sen. Susan M. Collins, R-Maine, in February 2011 at the start of the budget process.
Such reasoning may be more the exception than the rule, however. Ongoing cuts show that Congress as a whole may not be connecting the dots between federal funding and ongoing readiness at the state and local levels.
Perhaps this should not come as too much of a surprise. Emergency management professionals say the waning support can be seen as a natural part of the budgeting process. The events of 9/11 brought a spectacular influx of cash into the first responder community, money that helped build physical infrastructure and forge regional capabilities. That was more than 10 years ago, however, and priorities have since drifted elsewhere, which makes for a shortsighted policy, some allege.
“We saw a huge infusion of funding to put the infrastructure in place to protect the nation,” Herrmann said. “Now we have been gradually eating away at that infrastructure through these budget reductions and budget cuts, to the point where we may very well be in a place where we can’t respond in the ways that we feel we should.”
While it’s tempting to lay the blame on Washington, even some emergency management advocates acknowledge that part of the budget crisis stems from emergency management’s own inability to argue its case. Metrics of success still are lacking.
“We have been trapped in the pattern of defending one program or defending another, and Congress still wasn’t getting the answers it wanted,” Mullen said. To that end, the National Emergency Management Association has produced a pair of papers, including the July 2011 Keeping a Promise to the Nation, to demonstrate the efficacy of federal dollars at the state and local levels. “It basically said: You haven’t wasted all this money.”
The money may be wasted, though, if the gains that have been made are squandered through neglect. All the new equipment, new infrastructure, new cooperative ties: It takes money not just to build these, but also to sustain them.
“All the money you invested in them in the first place is going to be lost, the capability is going to be lost,” Filler said. “Is the world going to stop turning if these programs go away? No. But will there be less of an ability to deal with forest fires, hurricanes, tornadoes? Yes. It’s not that the country won’t be able to respond, but we won’t be able to respond as effectively.”
The problem is compounded by the fact that many states have dramatically reduced their own emergency management spending in recent years, as the federal government has shown itself willing to shoulder the burden. Basic political truth: Once funding is taken away from a program and spent elsewhere, it becomes extremely difficult to reclaim.
Yet that is just what Congress seems to want to have happen. Lawmakers have shown a commitment to the idea that states now need to resume support for what are essentially state functions.
While it may hurt in the short term, some say this is exactly the road state legislators and emergency managers need to be willing to take.
“States need to allocate the funds in their budgets organically, rather than waiting for the federal sugar daddy to cover the costs,” said Matt Mayer, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “It’s inherently a state role. Why should Ohio have to subsidize emergency management in Florida? Why don’t we let that money just remain in the states, and the states can cover it on their own? It’s a much smarter way to go.”
