Homeland Security Operations First Exam
Jeffersonian Model
Public managers should make their decisions as the product of grassroots public consultation and the consensus of interest group recommendations.
Long-term recovery
"Addresses the basic dimensions of a community's existence: permanent housing, economic conditions, the environment, the infrastructure (e.g., roads, bridges), and lifelines (e.g., water, power, telephone service)." 22
Civil defense
A U.S. national policy since World War I aimed at preparing the nation for possible attack by enemy nations. After 1949, civil defense policy transitioned to preparation for nuclear attack but became defunct after the end of the Cold War.
Inclusive-authority model
A model of intergovernmental relations in which each level of government has a diminishing proportion of responsibilities, from the national to the state to the local government level. The federal government coordinates and shares power and responsibility; however, the authority is essentially hierarchical (top-down control).
Hamiltonian public managers
A normative theory of public management in which public managers must learn and apply a growing body of knowledge, some of it practical knowledge and some of it academic knowledge. Hamiltonian public managers embody an authority of expertise, have mastered a specialized field of theoretical and applied knowledge, and are considered technocratic officials.
Jeffersonian public managers
A normative theory of public management in which public managers possess skill in consultation, negotiation, and communication and deftness in probing for public understanding and consent. Jeffersonian public managers are broadly educated generalists who are strictly accountable to the public and to elected overseers.
Issue-attention cycle
A pattern of public perception of certain domestic problems. The cycle has five stages and concerns the way major communications media interact with the public.
Emergency manager
A person who manages a comprehensive program for hazards and disasters and who is responsible in whole or in part for disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery within his or her government jurisdiction or organization.
National preparedness
A set of goals established by the secretary of homeland security under Homeland Security Presidential Directive-8 (HSPD-8), primarily focused on preparedness for terrorism-related events, especially the training and equipping of emergency response agencies.
Coordinate-authority model
A theory of intergovernmental relations that assumes a sharp and distinct boundary between separate national and state governments. National and state governments appear to operate independently and autonomously, and they are linked only tangentially. In the model, local governments are abjectly dependent on their respective state governments.
Profession
A vocation that is esoteric, complex, and discretionary and embodies self-directing work. It requires theoretical and applied knowledge, skill, and judgment that others may not possess or cannot easily comprehend. Theory-grounded knowledge, acquired through higher education, is the basis of most professions.
Analytical approaches
Approaches and models that allow for experimentation, trial, and error. They were the early basis of public policy analysis.
Applied heuristics approach
Based on heuristics, verbal explanatory sketches, or conceptual frameworks that help public managers produce adequate explanations for puzzling things. Heuristics embody propositions subject to confirmation or disconfirmation; that is, their usefulness can be tested.
Volkmer Amendment
Contained within the Hazard Mitigation and Relocation Assistance Act of 1993, it amended some parts of the 1988 Stafford Act. It increased Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds dedicated to community assistance disaster funding for relocation or hazard mitigation activities from a subsidy of 10 percent (in the original Stafford Act of 1988) to 15 percent. Once FEMA has paid out a sum total of federal disaster relief to a state under a presidential declaration of major disaster, the state is then entitled to receive additional federal money equivalent to 15 percent of the total funds the state received from the federal government under the declaration. The state may use this additional federal money to subsidize state and FEMA-preapproved disaster mitigation projects. The Volkmer Amendment also increased from 50 percent to 75 percent the federal share of the cost of specific pre-disaster mitigation activities or projects. This increase greatly benefited states and localities that put forward worthy mitigation projects and that were willing to come up with the remaining matching costs.
Civil defense preparedness
During the Cold War, from about 1949 to 1990, various civil defense measures were taken against the possibility of nuclear attack. Tools of civil defense preparedness have included mass evacuation planning, public shelter programs, and home fallout shelters.
Structural hazard mitigation
Efforts to contain a hazard, such as building dams and other flood abatement works and coastal infrastructure, or strengthening buildings and other structures to withstand disaster stresses. Often entails use of "hard" engineered structures.
Abstract reasoning
Helps produce testable knowledge and propositions that are generalizable and applicable in many contexts. Helpful in mathematical computation, in logic, and in making comparisons and identifying various associations among different types or sets of data and information.
Incidents of national significance
High-impact events that under the former National Response Plan (NRP) require an extensive and well-coordinated multiagency response to save lives, minimize damage, and provide the basis for long-term community and economic recovery. The president or the secretary of homeland security had authority to declare incidents of national significance, which may be acts of terrorism or major disasters or emergencies. The term incidents of national significance was discontinued in 2008 when the National Response Framework (NRF) replaced the NRP. The term was judged to be confusing, duplicative, and a questionable grant of authority to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Jacksonian approach
Highly populist, advocates decentralization, which grants local governments greater autonomy with direct governance, concentrates authority in elected executives, minimizes legislative interference in public management, and allows elected executives to appoint their political partisans and allies to many government jobs.
Codified Knowledge
Impersonal knowledge that is learned through thinking and reasoning, not through social relationships. Such knowledge is often conveyed through scholarly publications. Much technocratic knowledge is produced from data analysis, repeated experimentation, scientific study, and ultimately published research products. If such knowledge is widely diffused and open to the public, people have an opportunity to study, learn, and perhaps master such information. If it is not diffused, only those with permission and opportunity to see it may learn from it.
Risk (in the context of hazards)
Is the likely consequence of a hazard, and so is "the combination of the probability of a hazardous event and its negative consequences." 44 To some degree, risk can be measured in objective, probabilistic, mathematical terms. Risk analysis is at the core of hazard identification and hazard vulnerability assessment. The study of risk is also a central part of insurance underwriting.
Disaster Recovery Frameworks (DFRs)
It involves restoration, rebuilding, and return to normalcy. The pool of players involved in recovery is often huge and far exceeds the number of players usually involved in disaster response. Late stages of disaster recovery may involve only relatively small numbers of emergency managers. Decisions regarding disaster recovery are fundamentally made at the local level of government. 9
Short-term recovery
May overlap some of the disaster response phase. It routinely includes, "search and rescue, damage assessments, public information, temporary housing, utility restoration, and debris clearance." 48
Counterterrorism
Offensive measures taken to prevent, deter, and respond to terrorism and terrorist attacks. Along with antiterrorism, it is the core mission of U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policy and involves threat detection, prevention, mitigation, target hardening, policing, and other preparedness and response activities.
Crisis Relocation Plan (CRP)
Part of civil defense planning against nuclear attack. Done at the state level with federal funds, common CRP activity included provision for population relocation, food distribution, and medical care.
National Disaster Recovery Framework
Promotes management and consultation schemes by which the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and its stakeholders can plan disaster recovery long before disasters occur. It is a FEMA-led initiative encouraged at the grassroots level.
Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1988
Reauthorizes presidential power to issue major disaster and emergency declarations, allows broader eligibility criteria, and specifies the type of assistance the president may authorize. Refines the definition of emergency clearly affording the president a great deal of latitude in determining what is or is not an emergency. The Stafford Act came to demarcate the beginning of modern-era national disaster management.
Emergency management
Relies on theories, concepts, and abstract knowledge as well as experiential learning and experimental research.
Horizontal fragmentation
Sometimes occurs when a disaster or emergency must be addressed by many different and competing government agencies, all working at the same level of government but with different duties and functions and sometimes overlapping jurisdictions. Common when officials of these agencies fail to coordinate their responsibilities with one another, act too independently of one another, duplicate their efforts, or work at cross-purposes with one another.
Issue salience
The importance of an issue to the public and to elected leaders.
Intergovernmental relations
The interaction and exchanges of public and private organizations across all layers of government. Intergovernmental relations reflect the growth of societal interdependence, in economic and technological terms, and have created a webbed and networked system of governance.
Nonstructural hazard mitigation
The use of "soft" engineering and other approaches, such as zoning laws, building codes, land-use regulations, and education of the public, to buffer wetlands against flooding, protect coastlines and barrier islands from erosion and development, encourage the use of landscaping that protects structures from flooding or wildfires, and otherwise protect hazard-prone, high-risk areas.
Bureaucratic politics model
They suggest that the desire of these public officials to protect or promote their own and their agency's special interests, as they compete with other agencies, forms a major motivating factor in shaping the timing and the content of their decisions.
Chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN)
Types of weapons of mass destruction that terrorists may seek to acquire and use. A core mission of U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policy is to prevent terrorists from obtaining, transporting, and detonating such weapons; denying them the opportunity to develop CBRN weapons on their own; and developing countermeasures and recovery strategies in the event a CBRN weapon is detonated or released.
Tactic Knowledge
Vague and ambiguous knowledge that depends on sharing expectations and values through social relationships. Neither easily conveyed nor learned from the outside, this form of knowledge is often acquired through observation, internships, apprenticeships, mentoring, or on-the-job socialization experiences.
Federal zoning
Zoning by the authority of the federal government. It is fiercely contested by protectors of local land-use authority, who perceive it as federal encroachment into matters of local land-use, zoning, and building regulation. This perception has sometimes impeded federal efforts to promote disaster mitigation at the local level, such as National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) risk mapping of local governments.
Three models of intergovernmental relations
inclusive authority, overlapping authority, and coordinate authority.
Best-practices approach
learning from prior mistakes, sharing knowledge about innovative practices, and making improvements through analysis of after-action reports. If followed in accord with the social scientific approach, this approach may help produce scholarship that is a basis for practice.
Generalists
Broadly educated people, who in public management are likely to be highly politically responsive and able to fulfill government executive obligations of public responsiveness. It is assumed that generalists are better able than specialists to address humanitarian aspects of disaster assistance and are better able to work compatibly with others in the intergovernmental world of domestic disaster management.
Policy Window
represent the confluence of three separate streams: problem, policy, and politics.
Dual federalism
A government system in which sovereignty is constitutionally split between at least two territorial levels so that units at each level have final authority and can act independently of the other in some areas. Citizens thus have political obligations to two authorities. In U.S. history, the period from 1789 to 1901 has been termed the era of "dual" federalism, because there was little collaboration between the national and state governments.
Emergency declaration
A category of presidential declaration authorized in law in the Disaster Relief Act of 1974 and issued as a matter of life and safety before an event or when a disaster is still transpiring. Unlike major disaster declarations, emergency declarations can be issued by the president with or without a governor's request, and governors are not required to document need or estimate losses as a condition of their request.
Major disaster declaration
A category of presidential declaration established initially by the Federal Disaster Act of 1950 and revised and augmented by the Stafford Act of 1988. It opens the door to federal disaster assistance, mobilizes federal agencies to respond in accord with a national response plan or framework, specifies one or more political jurisdictions (a state and eligible counties), delineates who is eligible for relief, and contains an initial statement about the kinds of assistance people or subnational governments may request. Acting on a governor's request for such a declaration, the president has authority to approve it or turn it down. Incorporated municipalities in a county are eligible to receive federal assistance under a major disaster declaration through county government and often under conditions set in place by the respective state government.
Lack of technical expertise
A common criticism of many emergency managers owing to confusion about the kind of expertise one needs to be an effective emergency management. Controversy about the technical expertise needed to identify and assess hazards adequately, predict the occurrence of disasters, and provide the requisite technical information for the design and implementation of effective programs in emergency management. Even when hazards have been identified, it is often unclear just how much risk is involved and how this risk is to be measured. Emergency management as a field is highly dynamic, so the education and skills required to do it are ever changing.
New Federalism
A component of President Reagan's political ideology. It maintained that states too often relied on the federal government for help in matters they could easily address on their own. Reagan insisted that the federal government needed to be less intrusive in matters traditionally left to state and local government. A catchword of the Reagan era was "devolution" of certain federal responsibilities back to the states and localities.
National Response Framework (NRF)
A comprehensive all-hazards approach and master plan intended to strengthen and improve the ability of the United States to manage domestic incidents. In 2008 the federal government officially replaced the National Response Plan (NRP), with changes, as the NRF. The NRF provides a template for federal, state, and local governmental cooperation and coordination in disaster response. In December 2013 the second edition of the NRF was launched. It is based on the version released in 2008. The new NRF incorporates a focus on whole community and core capabilities. For example, the framework now describes the important roles of individuals, families, and households in response activities. Also, the frameworks are intended to be strategic documents, with tactical planning and concept of operations content reserved for the new Federal Interagency Operational Plans (FIOPs). As a result, the revised NRF is shorter and more strategic than its predecessor. 30
Tightly coupled interdependence
A concept employed by Charles Perrow in his seminal book Normal Accidents. It is a theory of organization that holds that high-risk systems of many modern complex and technology-dependent organizations are vulnerable to failure, sometimes with catastrophic consequences, because the sociotechnical operations upon which they function manifest tight interdependencies or linkages. Owing to their complexity and interlocking operations, they tend to fail quickly, unexpectedly, often with little or no warning (or misread warnings), and they defy correction by operators, who themselves sometimes compound rather than resolve problems. Owing to tight coupling and interdependence of operations, failures or errors, whether human or technological tend to produce effects and consequences that spread rapidly, uncontrollably, and often in unanticipated ways.
Local emergency management committees (LEMCs)
A disaster-planning network used by local emergency managers that increases coordination among local agencies. 20 LEMCs succeed when they effectively receive and respond to community information requests, when they establish and maintain good working relationships with people of the news media, when they earn and maintain local support, and when they retain the confidence and backing of local officials. 21
Self-help
A government policy of encouraging individual responsibility for disaster preparedness and, conversely, less public dependence on government for the same purpose.
Federal Response Plan
A plan that established a process and structure that was more systematic, coordinated, and effective in delivery of federal assistance, all to address the consequences of any major disaster or emergency. The FRP also directly stated that sometimes a major disaster or emergency may affect the national security of the United States. Devised over the late 1980s and formally emplaced in 1992, the FRP was based on a template of emergency support functions (ESFs) that drew on the personnel and resources of a wide range of federal agencies, some with lead authority for certain support functions. It was revamped to include terrorism response after the 9/ 11 attacks, and it remained federal policy until it was replaced by the National Response Plan (NRP) in 2003.
Hazards
A potential threat to humans and their welfare arising from a dangerous phenomenon or substances that may cause loss of life, injury, property damage, and other community losses or damage.
"Wind" versus "water" dispute
A problem of claims adjustment and contested insurance coverage often encountered after disasters that cause both wind and water damage to a private structure. Private insurers cover wind damage (but not that caused by floodwater) in their homeowner insurance policies. The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) covers floodwater damage but not wind-caused damage. Consequently, sometimes after hurricanes or severe storms many homeowners have fallen into insurance "limbo" as their private insurer's claims adjuster denies claims for damage they believe is caused by flooding (not wind) and the NFIP claims adjuster rejects claims for damage they conclude was caused by wind (not floodwater). A vast number of NFIP and private homeowner insurance policyholders in Katrina damage zones ended up having their claims denied by both the NFIP and their private insurer on these grounds.
Preparedness
Activities, laws, or policies designed to increase readiness or improve capabilities for disaster response and recovery operations. A pre-disaster activity aimed at helping the public survive and cope with the effects of possible future disasters.
Mitigation
Activities, laws, or policies that attempt to prevent disasters or reduce potential losses from disasters. Mitigation is often between-disaster activity. Mitigation may be structural (engineered) or nonstructural (behavior changes, zoning laws, land-use restrictions, and the like).
Domestic Incidents
Acts of terrorism and disasters in the homeland stemming from natural or other human causes. Their management was addressed by the secretary of homeland security in the National Response Plan (NRP) and the National Incident Management System (NIMS). In official terms, domestic incidents came to represent a marriage of conventional disaster management and terrorism consequence management.
Multi-hazard approach
An approach in which the government would manage all kinds of hazards, rather than maintaining unique and separated capacities to deal with different types of disaster agents. To the extent possible, methods and tools used to address one type of disaster would be applied to a variety of types.
Hazards U.S.-Multi-Hazard (HAZUS-MH)
An earthquake computer simulation applicable and adaptable to most of the nation developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the 1990s, it is a powerful risk assessment software program for analyzing potential losses from earthquakes. HAZUS-MH, a newer generation of HAZUS, models potential losses from hurricanes, winds, and floods as well as earthquakes for specific locations across the nation.
Reinventing government movement
An extension of the New Public Management movement of the 1990s, a movement that offered low-level administrators more power and, informed by modern management consultants, concluded that organizations need to rediscover the importance of customer satisfaction. It also advocated broader governance, under which public and private sector organizations might work together under more cooperative or blended arrangements. The movement was embraced by the Clinton administration as a tool for improving federal public management.
Moral hazard
An increase in the probability of loss caused by the behavior of a holder of insurance. In the realm of the insurance market, those whose homes are insured behave carelessly or dishonestly by failing to take reasonable measures to protect their homes from a known disaster threat because they expect that insurance will cover their losses if a disaster transpires. In the realm of government, this applies when lower-level governments forgo reasonable disaster mitigation measures because their leaders expect post-disaster assistance from upper-level government to cover their losses and so they believe they have realized a savings by not spending money on pre-disaster mitigation.
Dual-use approach
Approved in law in 1973, an approach in which civil defense activities could also be used conjointly to prepare for natural disasters; the merging of civil defense and natural disaster management.
All-hazards emergency management
Assumes common sets of emergency preparedness and response procedures and practices are applicable in any locality and that an economy of scale is achieved by planning and preparing for disaster in generic terms rather than for each unique type.
Principal-Agent Theory
Assumes that managers (the principals) function in an environment in which they cannot observe whether their agents (subordinate workers and contractors) in fact carried out the instructions they issued. The theory, from economics and used extensively in performance-based government contracting studies, also assumes that agents hide information from principals and may use the information to act in ways contrary to what principals intended.
Homeland Security Act of 2002
Authorized creation of U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a superdepartment opened in 2003 and today has some 220,000 employees. It was formed by transferring some twenty-two federal agencies or offices into the new department. The DHS secretary, holding cabinet rank, and deputy secretary are managerial supervisors of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administrator. The law also recruited state and local government into the nation's war on terror.
Recovery
Begins as a disaster is ending or at the close of the disaster response phase. Involving activities, laws, or policies that return disaster-affected governments, communities, and people to their pre-disaster conditions, it may take months or years to complete and is usually the most expensive phase in the disaster cycle.
Response
Begins when a disaster event occurs or is imminent. It is also activities, laws, or policies applied in the immediate aftermath of a disaster to protect life and property, prevent secondary disaster effects, and reconstitute government operation
Disaster Relief Act of 1974
Created a program that provided direct assistance to individuals and families following a disaster. Although preceding laws had provided temporary housing aid and other modest forms of individual assistance, the new Individual and Family Grant (IFG) program—later renamed the Individual and Households Program (IHP)—finally bridged the gap that had existed between public and individual assistance. It also brought state and local governments into all-hazards preparedness activities and provided matching funds for their emergency management programs. The act also authorized in law the emergency declaration category of presidential declaration. Granting the president authority to issue emergency declarations opened the door to governor-requested, president-approved proactive federal mobilization for disasters that had not yet transpired but appeared imminent.
Social constructivism
Explains problems and policy issues by focusing on people's behavior and beliefs rather than on the putative "conditions" that are the object of those actions. Social constructivists maintain that it is the actions and persuasiveness of people, perhaps amplified through mass communications, which define what a phenomenon is or is not. Maintains that all cognitive functions originate in and must therefore be explained as products of social interactions and that learning is not simply the assimilation and accommodation of new knowledge by learners but is the process by which learners are integrated into a knowledge community.
Ethical code
Expresses principles and practices of behavior. Often adopted by a profession and promulgated by a government agency responsible for licensing a profession. Violations of these codes may be subject to remedies that are administrative (e.g., loss of license), civil, or criminal.
Generalized knowledge
Furnishes reasoning tools or conceptual lenses that hold explanatory power applicable within or across a wide variety of cases and circumstances.
Project Impact
In October 1997 the Clinton-Witt Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) launched an effort that sought to build disaster-resistant communities through public-private partnerships. It included a national public awareness campaign, the designation of pilot communities, and an outreach effort to community and business leaders. Under Project Impact, FEMA encouraged communities to assess the risks they faced, identify their vulnerabilities, and take steps to prevent disasters.
Social Media
Internet communications systems, software, and platforms that facilitate social networking including blogging, microblogging, photo sharing, video sharing, video streaming, wiki sourcing, virtual worlds, online radio, and aggregators (collective real-time monitoring tools of selected types of user exchanges).
Rational actor model
It posits in the ideal that a person (sometimes assumed to be the president or a leader of some type) makes decisions largely on his or her own, with the information they have available or which others have provided. It assumes the decision maker has rationally ordered preferences and motivations, as a unitary or single actor. It holds that the decision maker knows and understands the problem requiring a decision and that he or she has considered all reasonable alternatives or courses of action before making the decision. Under assumptions of the model, the president is assumed to be making rational decisions on behalf of the entire national government and that these decisions are definitive at the time they are made. It also assumes that individual rationality inheres in that decision making.
Technocrat
Official of a public bureaucracy who possesses special knowledge and expertise most average citizens do not have and who works under norms of objectivity and political neutrality.
Vertical fragmentation
Occurs in disaster management when officials of these levels of government—federal, state, and local—fail to coordinate their responsibilities, act too independently of one another, duplicate their efforts, or work at cross-purposes, or when one level of government fails to carry out its obligations in an intergovernmentally organized system.
Stakeholders
Persons, individually or in a group, who have, or think they have, something to gain or lose. In emergency management, they are people and organized interests of people affected by the decisions of policymakers and emergency managers. Some stakeholders unselfishly seek benefits or protections for the people or groups whose interests they champion.
Camcorder politics
Politicization of major and minor disasters before, during, and after the time they occur fueled by the ability, since the early 1980s, of television news to cover breaking stories worldwide through the use of portable camcorders, remote linkups aided by orbiting communications satellites, and other technology. News commentators and reporters as well as political officials and pundits help create a "politics of a disaster" and so are customarily parts of the phenomenon. The public's massive use of smart phones with video and Internet connectivity in recent years has increased the camcorder politics phenomena by many orders of magnitude. Citizen journalism and online video sharing through YouTube and other sites provide a daily stream of information to news organizations—some of which are exclusively found online.
Federal Disaster Relief Act of 1950
Provided an orderly and continuing means of assistance by the federal government to states and local governments in carrying out their responsibilities to alleviate suffering and damage resulting from major disasters, including floods. It created the first permanent system for disaster relief without the need for congressional post-disaster action. It also clearly stated for the first time that federal resources could and should be used to supplement the efforts of others in the event of a disaster. The law made federal disaster assistance more immediately accessible because it no longer required specific congressional legislation to address each new disaster but instead simply allowed the president to decide when federal disaster assistance was justified and necessary.
Decentralization
Refers to the decentralized nature of the U.S. government and its functions; it is necessary due to the great size and population of the nation, the thousands of subnational governments, and the U.S. system of federalism. It is also part of a national policy of devolution of certain federal powers back to the state and local levels.
Jacksonian public managers
Self-reliant, courageous, individualistic, and entrepreneurial public managers who construct their own destiny despite once working within the patronage system of placing political supporters into appointed government offices. Jacksonian public managers present themselves as bold, prominent figures and assert their personality with zeal while adhering unconditionally to their beliefs. 18 They articulate public desires sometimes in defiance of political elites, particularly legislators, whom they tend to view with profound suspicion. Individualistic and entrepreneurial, the Jacksonian public manager will take the initiative and pursue new directions in light of government perversion or inefficiency. 19
National Response Plan (NRP)
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly referred to as the 9/ 11 Commission, called on the George W. Bush administration to prepare a comprehensive national response plan that would replace the Federal Response Plan (FRP) and give greater attention to terrorism prevention, preparedness, and consequence management. The NRP, launched in 2003, integrally included state and local government and non-profit or for profit corporation stakeholders. It retained the FRP template of emergency support functions (ESFs) that called on a variety of federal agencies and their resources when needed. Under the NRP, primary responsibility for managing domestic crises was now to rest with the secretary of homeland security. The plan contained language strongly suggesting that the federal government would in the future assume more responsibility for directly managing some crises.
Fragmented government responsibility
The United States has a highly decentralized, federal system of government, which under the U.S. Constitution affords the national government a range of authority. Some powers are reserved for the states under the Tenth Amendment. Similarly, in some states, local governments, although legally vestiges of their respective state government, possess certain powers under home rule provisions approved by their states, by their state constitution, or through enabling statutes. The federal system of layers of governments tends to fragment responsibility.
Emergency management
The discipline and profession of applying science, technology, planning, and management to deal with extreme events that can injure or kill great numbers of people, do extensive property damage, and disrupt community life. Efforts are made to limit losses and costs through the implementation of strategies and tactics reflecting the full life cycle of disaster: preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation.
National Incident Management System (NIMS)
The elaborate tactical arm of the National Response Framework (NRF), designed to help federal, state, and local governments address domestic incidents, whether acts of terrorism or disasters stemming from natural or other human causes. All federal agencies were required to adopt NIMS and state and local governments were required to use it as a condition of federal assistance. The NIMS incorporated many existing emergency management "best practices" into a comprehensive national approach to domestic incident management, applicable at all jurisdictional levels and across all responder occupational fields. Its purpose was to help responders at all jurisdictional levels and across all disciplines to work together more effectively and efficiently. A core component of the NIMS was the Incident Command System (ICS). The NIMS has a core set of doctrines, principles, terminology, and organizational processes. It is supposed to be based on a balance between flexibility and standardization. It seeks a consistent, nationwide template for incident management.
Disaster Relief Fund
The main repository of federal disaster spending authority available to the president. Funded from an annual congressional appropriation and from residual, accumulated spending authority on previous disasters, it is often replenished and expanded to pay for extremely costly disasters by congressionally approved disaster supplemental appropriations.
Disaster management
The tactical and operational implementation of an emergency planning strategy at the time of a crisis. In presidentially declared emergencies and disasters, emergency managers are also disaster managers both in strategic and tactical terms. The terms disaster management and emergency management are often used interchangeably.
Limited federal response
The tendency of Congress to pass a new law in the aftermath of each major disaster that provides additional routine relief funding, often largely symbolically, but which does little to address either the fundamental underlying causes of the disaster or problems in the system of disaster management as a whole.
Federalism
The theory or advocacy of federal political orders, where final authority is divided between subunits and a center. Unlike a unitary state system, in a federal system sovereignty is constitutionally split between at least two territorial levels so that units at each level have final authority and can act independently of the others in some area or domain of policy.
Samaritan's dilemma
When providing assistance after a disaster reduces the economic incentives of potential victims to invest in protective measures, such as buying appropriate insurance and taking reasonable mitigation measures, prior to a disaster. If the expectation of disaster assistance reduces the demand for insurance, the political pressure on the government to provide assistance after a disaster is reinforced or amplified."
Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act (PKEMRA) of 2006
gives the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) more organizational autonomy than it has had since becoming part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Like the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Secret Service, FEMA is now classified as a distinct entity within DHS. In addition, the agency is no longer subject to the DHS secretary's broad reorganization authority under the 2002 Homeland Security Act. The act authorizes the FEMA administrator, as of March 31, 2007, to provide emergency-management-related recommendations directly to Congress after informing the secretary. The act also explicitly prohibits substantial or significant reductions, by the secretary, of the authorities, responsibilities, or functions of FEMA, or FEMA capability to perform them. Furthermore, the PKEMRA prohibits most transfers of FEMA assets, functions, or missions to other parts of DHS. PKEMRA has additional important provisions, which cumulatively significantly enhance the powers and duties of FEMA and its administrator.
What are the barriers to recovery?
government versus private sector disputes over property rights versus the public interest, legal liability issues, cost incidence (to whom will the costs of recovery ultimately be shifted and ultimately absorbed and what recourse do other parties have in escaping these costs?), migration of individuals and families away from the zone of damage, the permitting required to undertake major capital reconstruction whether public or private, and so on.
Hamiltonian Model
public managers expect others, especially strong elected executives, to judge them by whether or not their efforts produce the desired results. They work under after-the-fact accountability, and their concerns are performance and evaluation under public law. This model type and its supporters have over the past thirty or more years converted emergency management into an intellectual and scientific enterprise.
