Key planner criticizes Homeland Security

Emergency plan designer says agency's response to Katrina was too slow

The retired admiral who played a key role in drafting the Homeland Security Department's catastrophic emergency plan said the agency was too hesitant in executing it in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Retired Adm. James Loy, who until February was acting secretary of the department, said in an interview yesterday that the need for an immediate federal response was "pretty evident" but that the department did not act fast enough to take the lead....

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff ... waited until Aug. 30 - a day and a half after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast - to invoke the National Response Plan to take control of the disaster.

In doing so, Chertoff declared the situation an "incident of national significance," which put him in charge of the overall effort - trumping the authority of state and local officials ....

Once Chertoff made the declaration, he designated FEMA's Brown as his top man on the ground....

The plan allowed Brown to call the shots on how state and federal resources should be used, including the Defense Department. Instead, Loy said, the federal government used a slow "bureaucratic licensing process," in which it waited until local and state governments were overwhelmed before stepping in and waited again before asking the Pentagon, "the ultimate resource provider," to help.

"For God's sake," Loy said, the Defense Department gets "$450 billion a year to do what the federal government needs to get done." ...

"I would have expected the principal federal official [Brown] would have a once-a-day news conference down there," Loy said, adding that there's ample guidance in the national plan. "Heck, we even developed a public affairs index to the plan."...

--Baltimore Sun

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Here's Loy's bio from whitehouse.gov.