Regional staff would solve prioritization conflicts, report says
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should set up regional staffs to deal with preparedness issues and fund their efforts directly rather than support state and local initiatives through ineffective homeland security grants, argued a study released Monday by the Project on National Security Reform (PNSR).
The PNSR study, Recalibrating the System: Toward Efficient and Effective Resourcing of National Preparedness, called upon DHS and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to set up Regional Catastrophic Preparedness Staffs in the national FEMA regions as an extension of the National Preparedness System.
Under the proposal, state and local governments would assign personnel to the regional staffs, which would receive direct financial support from the federal government under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act Mobility program.
"It's only at the regional level where we can get to consensus for that region," PNSR Fellow John Morton, who directed the study, said in a statement.
"These standing regional staffs would be where federal, state, tribal, territorial, local, private sector, and non-governmental organization representatives would come together daily, from the beginning, as co-equal partners to build a bottom-up, collaborative culture of preparedness--or even resilience--and the collaborative regional programs to go with it," he added.
The study concluded that federal grants do not fully provide the level of support that developing these capabilities require.
"Federal assistance, grants, or other forms of assistance should be reserved for planning and operational efforts that require federal involvement," the study stated. "Federal law supports the premise that the federal government will provide assistance when disasters in the United States are of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the state and affected local governments. The entire Nation, therefore, assumes some degree of shared risk.
"And, since the states assume varying degrees of responsibility and risk, the federal government must either plan to support the least prepared state (the least common denominator)--which is a race to the bottom that could ultimately lead to state and local overdependence on the federal government--or start engaging with state and local governments to articulate clearly what is expected of them, what the federal government will provide, and what level of preparedness is unacceptable for events that will require federal participation," the report continued.
The regional staff envisioned by the study would work with planning, training and exercise offices in their state and local governments to run risk assessments, plan for operations in catastrophic events, validate their planning through exercises, conduct inventories of state capabilities to identify gaps in capabilities required in a disaster, and to evaluate the effectiveness of disaster preparedness capabilities overall.
Establishing the regional staffs with those mandates would address two big national preparedness challenges, the study offered.
First, there currently are unresolved conflicts over identifying risk in national preparedness. The federal government places emphasis on low-probability, high-consequence events but state and local governments tend to focus on high-probability events that present more pressing concerns for their communities. Regional Catastrophic Preparedness Staffs would provide a forum for consensus-building to address conflicts in resource prioritization.
Second, state and local governments lack the resources to effectively enact catastrophic preparedness plans although they are best suited to develop those plans. But providing direct federal funding for those efforts through Regional Catastrophic Preparedness Staffs would enable state and local governments to produce solutions that would work in their specific jurisdictions.
To support the establishment of regional staffs, the federal government should reprogram fiscal 2011 funding in development of concepts, estimates and plans for them, the study recommended. Further, the fiscal 2012 budget should initiate an annual appropriation for the Regional Catastrophic Preparedness Staffs.
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