News-Record.com

Until Monday, Brown headed the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The job made him the nation's point man in responding to hurricanes, earthquakes and other calamities.

It turned out he was utterly unfit for the position. Even his padded resume outlined no professional qualifications for such a critical responsibility.

Blame resides in the White House for making a terrible appointment in 2003. Also culpable is a system of government that allows presidents to put political allies behind big desks in high offices.

The FEMA debacle has exposed the practice of patronage that many Americans might have thought disappeared decades ago. It's alive and well -- and even useful, to a point.

Most people who work for the federal government are career employees. Some of them hold their positions because they're experts at what they do: managing national forests, conducting diplomatic relations with a particular foreign country, getting help quickly and effectively to hurricane victims, or performing some other special function.

But at the top of every government agency are a few people appointed by the president for whatever reason he wants. He may be rewarding them for working on his campaign or raising a lot of money. Some may be friends, or friends of friends. Others may have important political connections. They may or may not have any credentials associated with the functions of the agency they are assigned to lead.

That was Michael Brown, whose job prior to arriving at FEMA as general counsel in 2001 was heading the International Arabian Horse Association. The director of FEMA at that time was Brown's college friend, Joe Allbaugh. Brown quickly rose to deputy director and, when Allbaugh departed, to director.

Brown was politically reliable, from the Bush administration's point of view, and he seemed to perform reasonably well during last year's string of hurricanes. But the unprecedented destruction unleashed on the Gulf Coast by Katrina seemed to trigger a command meltdown at FEMA.

I know a little bit about federal government politics. In 1983 and '84, I was press and public affairs assistant to Thorne G. Auchter, President Reagan's choice to run the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

When Auchter took the job in 1981, he was a 35-year-old executive vice president of his family's construction company in Jacksonville, Fla. He played a key role in Reagan's presidential campaign in Florida. Although he had confronted occupational safety issues in the construction industry, he certainly was an unconventional selection to lead a federal agency that dealt with workplace issues ranging from ergonomics to exposure to asbestos and hazardous chemicals.

But Auchter wasn't picked because he knew much about chemistry or toxicology or repetitive motion injuries. That's what you hired experts for. He was there because he was a good manager who was willing to implement Reagan's push for regulatory reform.

The task given to Auchter and his handful of political assistants was to change OSHA's direction from an agency that impeded business and industry with excessive and unreasonable regulations to one that worked more cooperatively in order to achieve the same results with less difficulty. Not everyone liked that approach or thought it was effective -- although numbers showed reductions in workplace deaths and injuries during Auchter's tenure.

Without political leadership, government agencies wouldn't change from one administration to the next and it wouldn't matter a great deal who occupied the White House. The federal bureaucracy would rule rather than the president.

At the same time, political leaders have to recognize that the career employees are the people who get the important day-to-day work done. No matter what philosophical attitudes hold sway in Washington, safety inspectors have to visit work sites and point out dangers; researchers have to investigate the effects of harmful substances and propose the means to protect employees from them. If OSHA under Auchter's direction failed to prevent some foreseeable workplace catastrophe, his fate would have been -- should have been -- the same as Brown's.

Why FEMA needed political direction in the first place I don't know. That's one agency that should rely entirely on competent experts from top to bottom. The new acting director, David Paulison, a former fire chief in Miami-Dade County, Fla., fits that profile.

It was a huge mistake to place someone in charge who lacked the right experience. The irony is that, by having the wrong man on the job, Bush also created a political mess.