Disaster Management
It is unfair to claim that the homeland security policy of 2001 centralized disaster management in the USA at the federal level in the USA. Terrorist threats changed “emergency management as a matter of civil defence to a matter of homeland security” (Kapucu & Ozerdem, 2013, p.117). According to the homeland security act of 2001, the federal government is only supposed to intervene if the resources of the state and local governments cannot manage the disaster. Disaster management has always been the mandate of state and local governments. This is because they are better accustomed to understanding the risk areas and coming up with relevant recovery programs after the disaster. The federal government hands a lot of money to states and local governments for disaster management. Therefore, while it is true that the federal government is a major stakeholder in disaster management, claiming that it has weakened local control over local disaster management is absurd. Some disasters are too immense to be handled by local resources, and this is where the federal government comes in to assist.
Because of the many stakeholders of disaster management, political differences arise because of the different interests of the stakeholders. For example, on the day of Pentagon bombing, the secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared that the Pentagon would open its offices on the next day as a show of American resilience, against the advice of the fireman and emergency managers (Howitt & Leonard, 2009). Emergency managers are usually caught between these political differences. An emergency manager can use the political interests of the stakeholders to obtain an advantage. For example, if the manager needs local support to mitigate the disaster, the manager can support the interests of the local stakeholders so that they can rally local support.
Reference:
Howitt, A. M., & Leonard, H. B. (2009). Managing crises: responses to large-scale emergencies. Washington, D.C: CQ Press.
Kapucu, N., & Özerdem, A. (2013). Managing emergencies and crises. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Publishers.