A social network analysis angle to FEMA's failure

Back in July 2005, a major reorganization of FEMA was announced, apparently resulting in a more complicated structure with regard to coordination.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was announcing Wednesday a controversial plan to split the Federal Emergency Management Agency in half as part of a major restructuring of his department, just over two years after it was first stood up in the largest and most complicated reorganization of the federal government for half a century...
... the department's Emergency Preparedness and Response Directorate is being dismantled. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency that currently makes up the bulk of the directorate, will return to being a stand-alone entity within the department, with a director, rather than the current undersecretary, reporting to straight to Chertoff.
But in a move that is likely to draw howls of protest from state and local emergency managers and FEMA's allies on Capitol Hill, the agency is being stripped of its preparedness functions, to concentrate on what some in the department see as its core competencies -- disaster response and recovery.
... said one former FEMA official who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivities of his current employer. "It's difficult enough (to plan responses to major disasters) when both those functions are in one place.
"It's unclear how separating them will bring them into better sync."

I recently noted this report regarding the role of middle management hadn't come out earlier.

Companies that cut middle managers jeopardize their productivity more than save costs, a study from McMaster University suggests.
"Middle managers are the front line communicators with employees," says Rick Hackett, Canada Research Chair in Organizational Behaviour and Human Performance at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University. "One-on-one social exchanges between bosses and their workers have a real impact on employee productivity, behaviour and commitment, and when you cut middle-management, often you lose that interaction."

From such a structural basis alone, it seems reasonable to conclude that such a dramatic reorganization of FEMA could hamper effectiveness until such internal trust and lines of communications could be rebuilt. Furthermore, new procedures were still being drafted, meaning the rules of interaction were in flux; perfectly bad timing made the situation worse.

Once Katrina came ashore, the newly completed National Response Plan spectacularly failed its first test. Chertoff neglected to activate it until the day after landfall, and Brown resisted the secretary's efforts to name him the principal federal official. And the 426-page plan proved to be mostly irrelevant once local responders were unable to participate; FEMA had not finalized the "Catastrophic Annex" that was supposed to guide that situation.