BY BILL MANNING
The Department of Homeland Security’s assault oN the National Fire Academy (NFA) continues. In December, it slashed the NFA’s course development budget by another 28 percent, for a grand total (thus far) of 48 percent in two years. Why does the DHS, and specifically its gigantic Office of Domestic Preparedness (ODP) directorate, pick on the NFA? The NFA represents an obstacle to ODP’s goal of controlling all federally funded training for first responders. Take away the NFA’s course development budget, and you remove its relevance. Take away relevance, and it’d be curtains for the NFA.
Just when you think we in the fire service have learned the hard way not to point our political guns at ourselves comes this tale of woe. Consider the International Association of Fire Chiefs’ (IAFC) reaction to the $100 million cut in the 2005 FIRE Act grant program. Responding to that 13-percent reduction, IAFC President Chief Bob DiPoli, though admittedly “quite disappointed,” said, “I realize that the nation is at war and facing a defense budget in the hundreds of billions of dollars, along with billions of dollars in aid to hurricane-ravaged Florida. When this nation is on a better financial footing, the IAFC will press Congress very hard to restore full funding to the FIRE Act.” Coming from Chief DiPoli, a tenacious FIRE Act supporter from the beginning, this was a shocking statement.
Have the rules for engagement in our nation’s capital suddenly changed whereby nice guys finish first? If the nice-guy approach worked in Washington, we’d have had the FIRE Act passed in 1902 and by now its funding would have swelled to $200 billion a year, and Alan Brunacini would have just been named as the new secretary of the DHS, a position to which, I might add, he would have ascended without national scandal.
But in the chess game of power politics, no good deed goes unpunished. The IAFC’s “noble” decision to appease the powerful through submissive empathy—essentially issuing our elected officials a pass for underfunding the FIRE Act—sends a signal that the American fire service isn’t a high priority, after all. And if our own representation isn’t banging our drum loudly and without interruption, who will?
There’s no nobility in reverting to the acquiescent fatalism so characteristic of national fire politics prior to 1998 (that is, pre-FIRE Act). But there’s a convenience to it, if you’re passing off irresponsibility as strategy. Chief DiPoli rationalizes that the IAFC doesn’t want to “sabotage” its access to the White House. Is “access”—just being part of the discussion—the end, or increased fire service funding? If the leadership is so diplomatically inept that the choice becomes setting off a political nuke or playing the shrinking violet, then press the button. At least we’ll gain some respect.
You can’t help but wonder how the International Association of Chiefs of Police would respond in a similar situation, or how the FBI would respond to drastic cuts in its training academy. As it is, the IAFC’s “paradigm” is one that condemns the fire service to the status of ultimate political pushover. Check out the news releases on the IAFC Web site—much of it’s an endless roll of gushing appeasement. Government can do no wrong, so long as IAFC’s sitting at the table.
Lest the reader be shocked over that characterization, I refer to the IAFC’s fawning endorsement of Rudy Giuliani’s bodyguard and Department of Corrections guru Bernard B. Kerik—a man who until his appointment as NYPD commissioner had never held a management position in that organization—as DHS secretary. Forget the scandals, which now include an investigation into Kerik’s alleged mob ties. This is a man who, true to a 30-year succession of police brass that usurped proven FDNY response capabilities and continued to exacerbate the rivalries and tensions between the two agencies, was no friend of the fire service and wouldn’t know a real interagency operation if he tripped over it. He’s also a man who fell in lockstep with the Giuliani Administration’s whitewash of the real reasons that firefighters in the North Tower did not evacuate the building on September 11, 2001—a whitewash that was accepted not only by the 9-11 Commission but by the IAFC as well. Kerik is far from the man who “understands the needs and frustrations of local responders and [who] is expected to be a strong advocate for local fire service … needs,” as the IAFC saw things in its public appeasement—I mean, announcement. But then, ours is a strategy of leadership by appeasement.
The DHS still hasn’t produced a workable national response plan that includes the fire service. Isn’t it time to ask why not? What’s the plan for coordinating local, state, regional, and federal entities into a seamless response network? Does the DHS even know what it has in the fire service, region by region, state by state, municipality by municipality? When you consider that the DHS refused the United States Fire Administration a measly $100,000 to develop a fire service response plan, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to think of the fire service as the Rodney Dangerfield of the DHS.
A qualified source describes a meeting at the White House that included representatives of the IAFC and Administration officials: When a chief suggested that, out of balance and good sense, a member of the fire service should be appointed to a high-level DHS undersecretary position, the Administration official nearly fainted on the spot. Seems he’d never considered such a crazy thing before. You don’t think our second-class citizen status within the federal response order is just paranoia, do you?
SPECIAL “BILL-ETIN”: A new bill, sponsored by Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, S. 3010, the Firefighters Special Operations Task Force Act, is emerging as the fire service’s next great opportunity. Emulating the extraordinary success of the FIRE Act, the bill seeks direct federal-to-local grants to subsidize personnel, equipment, and training to forge a coordinated network of highly trained fire service task forces to respond immediately to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and haz-mat incidents.
Based on the successful regional WMD task force concept employed in Westchester County, New York (see “Proposed Task Force Would Expand Homeland Security Network,” Raymond F. Kiernan, Fire Engineering, June 2002), the bill calls on Congress to appropriate $1.5 billion in 2006 and $1 billion in each year from 2007 through 2015 to build on existing fire department resources by providing the funds to hire or rehire personnel for the 120-member WMD task forces, pay the expenses for task force training, purchase equipment (including vehicles and support systems) for the teams, and enhance interagency communications/interoperability.
Unlike the FEMA USAR concept, with a limited number of national teams scattered regionally throughout the country, this bill seeks to establish a seamless integration of enhanced preexisting local fire capabilities that blanket urban and suburban areas that are under the greatest threat of a WMD strike. And it proposes to do so without the “middle men,” that is, state governments.
This is better than a DHS plan—but then, the DHS has no plan for the fire service. Write letters to your congressional representatives supporting this bill, and strongly urge them to co-sponsor the bill when it’s reintroduced in the 109th Congress.
