"On second thought, Brownie, you are one hell of a screwup'

So FEMA head Mike Brown has been sacked. Not discharged. Just evacuated from the combat zone and out on light duty in the rear, at full pay and benefits.

The Washington Post reports:

In Washington, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced that he has recalled Brown, the embattled director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, from his post as head of federal relief efforts on the ground in the Gulf Coast area and has replaced him with a senior Coast Guard officer.

He said Brown, who has come under heavy criticism for what is widely perceived as a slow and inadequate initial federal response to the disaster, will return to Washington and will remain as head of FEMA. Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, the Coast Guard's chief of staff, will take over as the chief federal official in charge of Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, Chertoff said. He had named Allen to be Brown's deputy for the New Orleans area on Monday.

Brown said Chertoff told him of the change today at 10 a.m.

Chertoff explained the recall of Brown and his replacement by Allen as dictated by a move to "the next phase of operations" in the hurricane relief effort. He said the FEMA director needs to be in Washington to carry out broader responsibilities, including potentially managing "other kinds of disasters" and dealing with additional hurricanes. He suggested that the change would also meet the need for a "seamless interaction with military forces" in the relief effort.

"Mike Brown has done everything he possibly could to coordinate the federal response to this unprecedented challenge," Chertoff said. The FEMA director "has got a lot of other responsibilities," he said, adding, "We cannot afford to let our guard down. I want to make sure FEMA continues to be run the way it needs to be."

Chertoff refused to answer questions about Brown's possible resignation or reports that the FEMA director embellished his resume.

That's a start. It was overdue. But Brown should be fired. In fact, he never should have been hired in the first place. This New Republic article explains why he was in way over his head at FEMA. He's a fraud -- but a good Republican. (By the way, it's not just Brown who's unqualified. The Washington Post says five of the top eight FEMA people are politically-connected appointees with no relevant experience.)

MIKE BROWN'S PADDED RESUMÉ.
Legal Brief
by Paul Campos

By now, the basic contours of Mike Brown's ascendancy to director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema) have come to light. Journalists have uncovered that Brown had almost no relevant experience for the position and got hired by FEMA because he was a longtime friend of George W. Bush's close associate Joe Allbaugh. The story being reported, in other words, is that Brown was a lawyer who ended up with a crucial post in the Bush administration because of rank cronyism.

This is a well-known Washington narrative: hotshot lawyer gets appointed to a high government office despite lacking the expertise someone in the position ought to possess. For example, on September 6, The Washington Post fit the Brown scandal into this narrative in a front-page story, saying that Brown has been "caricatured as the failed head of an Arabian horse sporting group who was plucked from obscurity to become President Bush's point man for the worst natural disaster in U.S. history."

Yet, far from being a caricature, this description, if anything, understates the absurdity of the situation. The real story of Brown's meteoric rise from obscurity is far more disturbing, as well as a good deal more farcical. It's clear that hiring Brown to run FEMA was an act of gross recklessness, given his utter lack of qualifications for the job. What's less clear is the answer to the question of exactly what, given Brown's real biography, he is qualified to do.

To understand the Mike Brown saga, one has to know something about the intricacies of the legal profession, beginning with the status of the law school he attended. Brown's biography on FEMA's website reports that he's a graduate of the Oklahoma City University School of Law. This is not, to put it charitably, a well-known institution. For example, I've been a law professor for the past 15 years and have never heard of it. Of more relevance is the fact that, until 2003, the school was not even a member of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS)--the organization that, along with the American Bar Association, accredits the nation's law schools. Most prospective law students won't even consider applying to a non-aals law school unless they have no other option, because many employers have a policy of not considering graduates of non-aals institutions. So it's fair to say that Brown embarked on his prospective legal career from the bottom of the profession's hierarchy.

So what did Brown, who received his J.D. in 1981, do with his non-aals law degree? In 1985, Brown joined the firm of Long, Ford, Lester & Brown in Enid, Oklahoma. When I spoke to one of its former members, Andrew Lester (the firm no longer exists), he recalled that Brown was with the firm for only "about 18 months." Lester, who is a longtime friend of Brown, believes that Brown spent most of his time in the first few years after law school pursuing his own legal practice and representing the interests of a prominent local family. Lester vigorously defended his friend's overall abilities, as well as his qualifications for the fema directorship, pointing out that fema had dealt with more than 100 federal emergencies during Brown's tenure. In any case, despite the claim of Brown's fema biography that he practiced law for 20 years prior to his 2001 appointment as fema's general counsel, it appears that, by 1987, he had already more or less abandoned his nascent legal career. From 1987 to 1990, Brown's resumé includes being the sacrificial lamb for the Oklahoma Republican Party in a 1988 congressional election, in which he won 27 percent of the vote against the incumbent Democrat, and stints as an assistant city manager and city councilman in Edmond, Oklahoma. (According to FEMA, because of these positions, "Mike Brown has a lot of experience managing people.") By 1991, he had moved to Colorado, where he became commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association (IAHA). This position, which never made his FEMA bio, was Brown's full-time job from 1991 to 2001, and it had nothing to do with the practice of law.

Brown's job was to make sure that horse show judges followed the rules, and his enthusiasm for their strict enforcement won him the nickname of "the czar," as well as the enmity of contestants, some of whom sued the Association, as well as Brown himself. According to a September 6 Denver Post article, Brown became embroiled in controversy when allegations were made that, to help pay his legal fees, Brown solicited a nearly $50,000 contribution from an iaha member whose conduct he was supposed to regulate. Lester, who represented Brown in the IAHA's suits, told me that this was a misunderstanding, due in part to the iaha's initial unwillingness to fulfill its contractual obligation to cover Brown's legal costs. "People are focusing on these attacks made against him when he was with the IAHA," Lester says, rather than looking at the work that Brown had actually done at FEMA. Brown resigned from his position in 2001 under pressure, and the IAHA was reorganized as the Arabian Horse Association.

What, then, are we to make of the claim in Brown's fema biography that, prior to joining the Agency, he had spent most of his professional career practicing law in Colorado? Normally, an attorney practicing law in a state for ten years would have left a record of his experience in public documents. But just about the only evidence of Brown's Colorado legal career is the Web page he submitted to Findlaw.com, an Internet site for people seeking legal representation. There, he lists himself as a member of the "International Arabian Horse Association Legal Dept." and claims to be competent to practice law across a dizzying spectrum of specialties--estate planning, family law, employment law for both plaintiffs and defendants, real-estate law, sports law, labor law, and legislative practice. With all this expertise, it's all the more striking that one can't find any other evidence of Brown's legal career in Colorado.

So what legal work did Mike Brown perform before his stunning reversal of fortune? According to his fema biography, "[H]e served as a bar examiner on ethics and professional responsibility for the Oklahoma Supreme Court and as a hearing examiner for the Colorado Supreme Court." Translation: In Oklahoma, he graded answers to bar exam questions, and, in Colorado, he volunteered to serve on the local attorney disciplinary board.

When Brown left the IAHA four years ago, he was, among other things, a failed former lawyer--a man with a 20-year-old degree from a semi-accredited law school who hadn't attempted to practice law in a serious way in nearly 15 years and who had just been forced out of his job in the wake of charges of impropriety. At this point in his life, returning to his long-abandoned legal career would have been very difficult in the competitive Colorado legal market. Yet, within months of leaving the IAHA, he was handed one of the top legal positions in the entire federal government: general counsel for a major federal agency. A year later, he was made its number-two official, and, a year after that, Bush appointed him director of FEMA.

It's bad enough when attorneys are named to government jobs for which their careers, no matter how distinguished, don't qualify them. But Brown wasn't a distinguished lawyer: He was hardly a lawyer at all. When he left the IAHA, he was a 47-year-old with a very thin resumé and no job. Yet he was also what's known in the Mafia as a "connected guy." That such a person could end up in one of the federal government's most important positions tells you all you need to know about how the Bush administration works--or, rather, doesn't.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado-Boulder.