PRESIDENT ENCOURAGES OTHERS IN GOVERNMENT TO EXAGGERATE ITS PERFORMANCE

…Typical FEMA flood

Inspector General required to retract inaccurate FEMA audits.

It is pretty embarrassing that the Homeland Security Department’s Acting Inspector General, John V. Kelly was required to retract FEMA audits because they were “not compliant” with federal audit standards.

What the Trump appointed acting Homeland Security inspector general has done was to direct the auditor’s to produce what they called “feel good reports” that down played their problems,  The reports portrayed emergency responders as “heroes overcoming their challenges”.  This is according to FEMA interviews and a new internal review.

These problems were with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s performance in Louisiana, and 11 other states over the last five years that were hit by hurricanes, mudslides and other disasters.

The “watchdog operation” concluded that FEMA’s response in Louisiana, where 13 people died in the disaster, was a “huge success, a remarkable, resilient and mission focused” effort that “provided hope and a way forward” for flooded communities.

This was all encouraged by the president, and directed by the acting inspector general, and all of that was what he was directed to retract.

Under pressure from Congress, the inspector general has retracted and purged from its website the Louisiana flooding report, and then it was directed the following year to retract a dozen other audits of FEMA’s initial responses.

Now the oversight agency, which evaluates the performance of FEMA and the rest of Homeland Security, has turned the spotlight on itself.  Last month it released a 14-month internal review of how Mr. Kelly, a career government auditor who rose to acting inspector general in late 2017, chose to flatter FEMA’s staff in some reports, instead of hold them accountable.

Kelly’s staff routinely praised FEMA’s initial disaster responses up to 2017 with “superlative language,” the investigators found.  Some reports used particularly “fawning terms”.

Invariably the auditors praised the agency for overcoming the challenges.  In other negative information, it pointed to systemic problems that was removed from drafts and sometimes placed in separate “spin-off reports,” the internal review found.

Investigators determined that Kelly didn’t just direct his staff to remove negative findings, he potentially compromised their objectivity by praising FEMA’s work ethic to the auditors.  He told them they would see “FEMA at her best” and instructed supervisors to emphasize what the agency “had done right”, in its disaster response.

The review concluded the office had not even met its own audit standards.

“Our prior approach resulted in unacceptable failures,” Jennifer Costello, the deputy inspector general, wrote to the head of the internal review team, calling the “retraction of publicly issued reports because they are not reliable . . . not an insignificant matter.”

The reports, Costello wrote, “represent millions of wasted taxpayer dollars and understandably cast doubt on our credibility.” She said the inspector general’s office needs to “hold ourselves to the same standards to which we hold the Department when conducting oversight of its programs and operation.”

Kelly had properly recused himself from the review.  Costello noted that the flawed audits represent a tiny fraction of the otherwise hard-hitting oversight of FEMA.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Kelly denied directing his staff to sanitize its initial disaster reports. “There was no motivation to make FEMA look good,” he said.

But he did send his staff an apology when the internal review was made public in May.

“I take responsibility for failing to set a tone that all of our products need to be fully objective,” Kelly wrote. “While I did not intend to set that tone with respect to the [FEMA] reports, I obviously did.”

Kelly, at 64, oversees a staff of 600 auditors and investigators charged with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the third-largest federal agency. He plans to retire when the Senate confirms a permanent chief. President Trump has now nominated Joseph V. Cuffari, a policy adviser to Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) and an experienced federal investigator.

Kelly has not faced discipline for coaxing his staff to produce the flawed reports.

Across all of the federal government, US agencies depend on inspectors general to provide them with independent, fact-driven analysis of their performance, conducting audits and investigations to ensure that taxpayers’ money is spent wisely.

Emergency management experts said that oversight, particularly from auditors on the ground as a disaster is unfolding, is crucial to improving the response, especially in ensuring that contracts are properly administered.

“I read a couple of those [retracted reports] and realized they weren’t good enough to help me,” said Craig Fugate, FEMA administrator for eight years under President Barack Obama.

“We’re not that good,” Fugate said of how the reports characterized FEMA’s performance. “The whole idea of the IG going out early was to find things we could do to take corrective action then.”

Even with improvements to emergency response in the deeply flawed aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, FEMA’s performance still is closely watched by local communities and Congress, where disaster response in the Trump administration has become extremely politicized.

Congress agreed only last week to send billions of dollars in long-delayed relief to lingering recovery efforts from multiple natural disasters, including Puerto Rico’s 2017 hurricane where Trump has told many of his mis-statements about our US territory.

Copyright G. Ater 2019