9/11 Federal Agencies

Throughout its history, FEMA has had two main missions. First, FEMA’s mission is to enhance the federal government 's capacity to deal with and survive foreign attacks. The main types of foreign attacks that FEMA is tasked to respond to relate to terrorist attacks and nuclear war. The second mission of FEMA is to assist state and local authori¬ties to respond to man-made and natural disasters that are to enormous for the local and state resources to respond to efficiently. While national security focuses more on civil defense, state and local authorities are more focused on natural disasters such as hurricanes, storms, floods and potential nuclear power accidents. These divergent focuses really presents FEMA with huge challenges since federal security authorities’ main objective is quite different from state or local authorities’ focus. Considering that FEMA designed the Federal Response Plan, the agency has the challenge of balancing these interests while working on its two key missions.

As Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma successively lashed the gulf coast starting in late August 2005, nature’s fury exposed serious weaknesses in the United States’ emergency response capabilities. Not all emergencies pose this magnitude of challenge. In the United States, the initial—and usually major—responsibility for disaster response rests with local authorities. This “bottom-up” system of emergency management has a long history and continues to make sense in most circumstances. Core Challenges for Large-Scale Disaster

After the attacks on September 11th, 2001 the United States was forced to reassess its policies over the defense of the country within its borders. Until that time the United States’ homeland security was under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice (Masse, O’Neil, & Rollins, 2007). After the attack the Executive branch of the government created a new organization that would be responsible for deciding where the biggest threats to the country were. This was the birth of the Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Homeland Security is responsible for assessing all risk to the Nation within its borders and developing way to mitigate these threats before a disaster can take place. One of the documents that the Department of

The 9/11 commission clearly identified a problem with communication between the Intelligence Community and State and Local Law Enforcement which resulted in a new edict (from the IRTPA) of Information Sharing yet clearance levels and accesses quickly became an issue in disseminating information to those with a need to know. To help bridge this gap, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 was passed to crate the DHS by bringing 22 under its umbrella with a primary mission of protecting the homeland from terrorism (Blum, 2010). To do so, DHS’s key mission is to collect, analyze, and disseminate key/related information and share it with the IC and nontraditional partners (state/local governments as well as the private sector) (Blum, 2010). Likewise,

According Paul McHale (2008), the “Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is responsible for the coordinated U.S. national effort to prepare for, prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from terrorist a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and high yield explosive (CBRNE) attacks. DHS role differs from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), DTRA protect the nation from WMD attacks, they concentrate on ensuring that WMD’s are not placed in the hands of any terrorists or enemies of the United States. Whereas, DHS duties are to prevent the attacks from occurring on U.S. soil. For example, DHS stops the deployment of weapons that may be in the hands of people looking to attack American and DTRA duty is to prevent these attacks

compared the ready availability of funds for disaster recovery to the paucity of funds for mitigating the effects of disasters before they strike (Roberts, p. 133). The review asserts, “mitigation has been called the most neglected aspects of emergency management” (Roberts, p. 133). The criticisms resulted in a professional consensus of reforming the emergency management goals—part of the consensus resulted in the creation of a mitigation directorate, and one year after the 1993 reorganization of FEMA caused by the ineffective response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 (Roberts, p. 133). A directorate that defined mitigation as reducing the impact of natural hazards, is one of the key elements for FEMA’s reinvented organizational structure.

the current multi-agency/multi-discipline approach to national disasters and emergencies. This summary briefly reviews the history of federal planning documents over the past twenty years as context for the present day, National Response Framework; and then highlights the response doctrine and its five principles, as it seems to encapsulate the National Response Framework overall. “Response doctrine

The terrorist attacks to the World Trade Center towers in New York City on September 11, 2001 has changed the way federal, state and local police departments communicate with each other, their structures, and operations. The new federal organization known as Homeland Security set out to coordinate their work at the state level, collect, analyze and share pertinent information and intelligence, protect key infrastructure and assets, secure the nation’s borders and ports, team up with federal and local task forces, and prepare new response training, equipment, systems and strategies (Foster and Cordner, 2005). The Federal Bureau of Investigation also shifted focus from addressing traditional crimes to preventing terrorist attacks. This is

Disasters are incidents that most hope to avoid but in reality they happen often. Preparation for these events is necessary if the damage and loss of life is to be mitigated. Several events have occurred in the last decade that has increased awareness of the necessity of emergency management. Events such Hurricane Katrina and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Both of these events had massive death tolls and millions of dollars worth of property damage. They both resulted in a public outcry for more effective intervention and assistance with disaster incidents. The National Response Framework (NRF) was created after both of these events and in response to criticism of the prior National Response Plan. The change of title from National

Disasters can strike people in any community in any time or without warning. Whatever the scenario, as the federal government emergency management and preparedness agency [FEMA] is part of the responders, their mission is to help communities nationwide to protect themselves from all hazards and to reduce the loss of life and property. FEMA supports the nations in a comprehensive emergency management system of preparedness

A reasonable national flood control policy has been instituted yet (Rubin, 2012). Federal government agencies like FEMA, were initiated to make disaster response better, but still major disasters are unpredictable (Rubin, 2012). FEMA covered all aspects of emergency management such as mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, a paradigm generated by the National Governors Association (Rubin,

In 2004, the National Commission on Terrorists Attacks published a report that determined that the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented if intelligence agencies were not so resistant to sharing information (“IC Strategy”, n.d.). The Homeland Security Act of 2002 and Presidential Executive Order 13356 propelled a national effort to improve information sharing and defined DHS’ initial role in the effort (“Information Sharing”, 2008). The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRPTA) of 2004 addressed many different facets of information gathering and the intelligence community including security clearances, border protection, and reform of the IC (“Intelligence Reform”, 2013). Importantly, it required the President to establish an information sharing environment (ISE) for sharing terrorism information in a manner that would protect people’s privacy and civil liberties (“Intelligence Reform”, 2013).

The first of these frameworks is called the National Incident Management System (NIMS) which provides a template on how national, state, and local governments should work together. Within this system, there are instructions for the Multi-Agency Coordination system (MACs) whose primary function is to “coordinate activities above the field level and to prioritize the incident demands for critical or competing resources, thereby assisting the coordination of the operations in the field” (Homeland, 64, 2008). The next framework is the National Response Framework (NRF) describes how communities, tribes, states, the federal government, and nongovernmental agents apply these principles for a coordinated, effective national response. The NRF is designed to provide the ”structure and mechanisms for national-level policy and operational direction for incident management to ensure timely and effective Federal support to State, tribal, and local related activities” (Homeland, 12, 2008). And finally the last important national response structure is the All Hazards Approach to preparedness. This approach provides a comprehensive, all hazards, and risk based in approach to preparedness and includes the Emergency Operation Plans (EOP). These plans are for explaining who, what, where, and when and by what authority for emergencies, including before, during and after the

The FEMA's mitigation programs had helped reduce the impact of natural disaster incident over the years by helping victims gain back what their lost after a natural disaster incident. The program depends on taxpayers and the Treasury for disaster relief. “The FEMA Mitigation and Insurance Strategic Plan for 2012-2014 identify critical goals, objectives and strategies to enhance the way FEMA carries out its mitigation and insurance mission” (n.d., 2015). The idea of this plan is built to help and sustain collaboration with federal, state, tribal, territorial and community partners to work together, become stronger, and are more resilient communities around the world. Mitigation is important because it provide aid by reducing or eliminating risk

Mechanisms and capacities to build resilience to hazards and to systematically incorporate risk reduction approaches into the implementation of emergency preparedness, response and recovery programs.