Remarks by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to the National Congress for Secure Communities

Release Date: December 17, 2007

Washington, D.C.

Secretary Chertoff: Well, that was an early Christmas present. That was a very nice introduction. And, by the way, sometimes people do ask me about giving up a life tenure job as a judge for this position, but I always say, in this job, a year is like a lifetime. So far, I've got three lifetimes at the job.

I want to thank Asa, not only for the introduction and for the invitation but for his work as National Advisory Board Chairman of the Corporate Crisis Response Officers Association, and also George Foresman -- I think he's here, he's also -- there he is -- member of the Advisory Board. Of course, we go way back. Asa was a plank owner at the Department of Homeland Security. He was really involved in standing it up, and I can tell you that coming onboard after a couple years, I realize what a remarkable job he did, and the senior leadership did, in standing up this department and laying out the basic framework. And, of course, George Foresman, who's been a Homeland Security expert for a long time at the local and state level, was also tremendously important in helping us retool ourselves after Hurricane Katrina in some of the lessons that we learned out of that event. Both of them have rendered tremendous service not only to the Department of Homeland Security, but to the nation. Let's give them a round of applause.

And I also want to take the opportunity to acknowledge the first responders who are with us today. Some of them are in uniform, some are not. You represent the frontlines in any response to a disaster, whether it's natural or man-made, and we value your partnership.

I also want to thank those in the private sector because you're critical in helping us carry out our mission, since most of the assets in the country are owned by the private sector, and most of the people work in the private sector.

As you all know, we had our fair share of emergencies and natural disasters this past year. As is often the case, what we predicted, worried about, doesn't come to pass; and what we don't think about, does come to pass -- which underscores the importance of all-hazards preparation. You're not necessarily going to know what the hazard is, but there will be a hazard, and you've got to be ready to deal with it.

So it was that this year, for the second year in a row, notwithstanding dire predictions of above-average hurricane years, we really had no major hurricane impact on the United States -- although we did have one close call with Hurricane Dean. On the other hand, we had a wildfire outbreak in Southern California that, I think, was one of the most significant in the history of that region, with tremendously devastating results for the population. We had tornadoes, we had floods, we had ice storms of epic proportions. So it seems that whenever we think we're in the season where we can draw a sigh of relief, something comes along to remind us that Mother Nature never takes time off. And it's also true that we have to be vigilant against the possibility of human beings who want to trigger a catastrophe or a disaster that could be every bit as significant as a natural disaster.

As we look back over the last year and evaluate the incidents that have occurred and our collective responses, I think we could say there's been some bad news and some good news. The bad news, of course, is that we had the disasters that I've just said. But the good news is that we've come a long way in how to prepare for and respond to these incidents. In each occasion, whether it was a flood in the Midwest, or a flood in the Northwest, or wildfires, or tornados, or ice storms, we have seen that preparation pays off in terms of better response in the case of an incident. We've learned a lot about what works and what doesn't work in a disaster.

And maybe the most important lesson we've learned is that the success to an effective response is what takes place well before the disaster: the planning, the preparation and the partnership. When you are in the middle of a disaster, that is not the time to begin planning. That is the time to determine whether your plan works, and to improvise, if necessary. But the better the planning, the preparation and the partnership in advance, the shorter the distance between improvisation and success.

So what are we doing to build on this set of lessons as we move forward in the 21st century? Well, we're doing a number of things. We've retooled the Federal Emergency Management Administration to give it 21st-century capabilities. We're streamlining our emergency operations strategy through the new National Response Framework. And we're reaching out directly to individuals, businesses and communities to encourage all-hazards planning and preparation throughout the country. And I'd like to talk briefly about each of these areas today.

Let me start by talking about FEMA. This past year FEMA has been tested in a number of ways, and in most instances it's performed much more like a 21st-century emergency management organization than would have been possible two or three or four years ago. Much of this is due to the rigorous steps we've taken to strengthen FEMA's core operations, and the new leadership in the organization, which is very much focused on the 21st-century mission. Some of it is our determination to make sure FEMA is equipped with the resources that it needs to operate in a 21st-century environment.

Among the things we've done is reorganized the agency to strengthen critical areas like operations planning, emergency management, and disaster assistance. We've also created the Community Preparedness Division to work with communities. We've also assessed FEMA's business functions, and improved procurement, its security, its information technology, its fiscal management, and its human resources.

By the way, many of these are not particularly glamorous things to fund and work on during the course of the year. Congress isn't always enthused about investing in these kinds of back-office functions, but without a solid back office -- management, IT, human resources -- it is very hard to function appropriately and effectively in the middle of an emergency. One of my main lessons is, a little bit of investment up-front, sometimes in not very glamorous things, pays up real dividends. It's like the old saying, let's not be penny-wise and pound-foolish.

One of the critical elements, of course, of FEMA is people, and I'm delighted to say that for the first time, we've achieved basically full-time staffing with a 10-year high of 95 percent staffing at FEMA. And we've filled critical positions in each one of our 10 regional offices. This is really a first for a long period of time.

Because of these enhancements, as of last week FEMA had successfully responded to 61 Major Disaster Declarations, 13 Emergency Declarations, and 60 Fire Management Assistance Declarations this year alone. And for the first time in my memory, we see praise for FEMA really outweighing the amount of criticism.

But perhaps more important than our disaster responses was our disaster preparation because that translates to effective response. And FEMA is beginning to institute a "lean forward" culture that newly defines how it executes its mission.

Of course, we still follow established emergency management protocols that have been in place among federal, state and local governments. FEMA therefore has to make sure that local and state governments have the lead because they are best equipped and best located to perform that function. But by pre-positioning resources and assets in critical locations, FEMA is now better equipped to respond immediately when states require federal assistance, rather than waiting until states and localities are completely overwhelmed before we begin moving critical supplies into an area.

This was exemplified by FEMA's extensive preparations for Hurricane Dean earlier this year. That was in the near miss Category 5 hurricane, which threatened the Gulf Coast, including, in particular, southern Texas, until it took a detour south and basically hit Mexico. FEMA worked with the state and leaned forward and had nearby relief supplies and personnel on standby, and remained in constant contact with state emergency management officials, including lining up buses and ambulances and other evacuation vehicles, to make sure that if it looked like that hurricane was going to hit people in the Brownwood area, we would be capable of working with the state and locals to make sure people could get out, particularly those who are medically compromised, or otherwise dependent on government assistance, to leave.

In addition to working closely with state and local officials prior to an emergency such as Dean, FEMA has also improved coordination with our federal partners, such as the Department of Defense, the Small Business Administration, the National Guard, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And we have teamed up with the private sector to develop the first-ever loaned executive program to bring private-sector logistics management into federal practice. Matt Lawrence, a UPS logistics expert, has agreed to work with FEMA's Logistics Management Directorate for nine months to provide us with private-sector expertise. This program is complemented by the creation of a Private Sector Office within FEMA, which is working closely with our business partners and the DHS department-wide Private Sector Office. All of these steps are part of a new culture at FEMA, and indicative of an aggressive approach to emergency preparedness and response.

Now, of course, emergency response is not just limited to FEMA or professional emergency managers. It requires all hands on deck from every level of government, and a wide variety of different government agencies at every level. So as we retooled FEMA, we devoted a lot of time and energy to simplifying and restructuring what had been called the National Response Plan.

As many of you know, the new National Response Framework, which is what I would call the National Response Plan 3.0, is a much more user-friendly document that outlines our emergency response doctrine, principles and architecture. Now, let me make it clear that this is a document which is remarkable in one respect -- it is written in English. I found, when I got to the department, the National Response Plan, while very comprehensive, was written in a form that was well suited to people who were professional emergency managers, but not that accessible to people with different kinds of disciplines, including, in many cases, our political leaders -- our governors, our mayors, and our department heads.

And so what we tried to do, particularly with a view to the transition that is coming up after this administration leaves office in 2009, was to use the retooling of the National Response Framework to really put into place what we would call doctrine -- a set of principles that we have learned and put together over time that lays out the philosophy of emergency response. And it's written in a very straightforward and accessible form that lay people can understand.

Now it is supported from below by a series of quite detailed operational plans and strategy documents that get into the nuts and bolts, and tell emergency managers and responders what they need to know, but it's all tied together in a way that, I think, gives a comprehensive vision of what the philosophy of emergency management is, and the philosophy emergency responses in the 21st century.

It was based on extensive input from over 700 representatives from federal, tribal, state and local governments, as well as non-profit organizations and the private sector. And I think it lays out a commitment to focused, coordinated emergency response at all levels. What this means is, we have to look at emergency response as not just how do we deal with hurricanes or earthquakes or this particular disaster or that disaster, but as a comprehensive vision of how we manage incidents and emergencies, whatever their cause and whatever their basis. We have to take the broadest possible sense of an emergency. It could be a cyber attack, it could be a pandemic flu, it could be a terrorist attack, or it could be an earthquake -- and we have to have a doctrine and a set of principles that works, no matter what the particular variant of an emergency we face is.

I'll be honest, this requires each of us to step out of our professional roles and take a look at the big picture, and recognize that no profession has a monopoly on dealing with emergency and incident response. What we have to do is bring all the disciplines together -- public health, law enforcement, traditional emergency response, even computer response -- and we have to be able to merge and integrate all of those to tailor our response to the particular kind of emergency which happens to appear on the horizon.

The National Response Framework, therefore, reflects our pledge to provide clear, concise information and a sound structure within which we can develop tailored planning for every one of the myriad types of challenges that we are likely to face as we enter into this new, very transformative century.

Now beyond the doctrine and the principles and the plans is the issue of culture. We need a culture of preparedness -- and that means engaging communities, businesses, schools and individuals, because despite our best efforts to put plans in place, and despite all the training that professionals undertake, unless we engage civic leaders to help us prepare the public, our emergency response efforts will always be strained and lives will be put at risk. And that's why we made community preparedness a priority in the National Preparedness Guidelines that we released in September.

We recognize it's a national effort to get community preparedness underway that will not be achieved overnight. But it will require instead continuous education and community involvement at all levels. And so we're taking a comprehensive approach by engaging community leaders, NGOs, and our partners in the private and public sectors so we can focus on preparedness and, as important, resiliency.

One of the ways we're building a culture of preparedness is our Citizen Corps program. In the nearly six years since its creation, Citizen Corps has seen tremendous growth and support from local communities. In fact, there are nearly 2,300 Citizen Corps Councils in all of our states and territories, and a new council is registered every two days. What these councils do is bring community and government leaders together to participate in emergency planning, training, exercise, and response surge development. The councils foster education and participation with the general public.

Our Ready campaign, which is undertaken with the private sector and the Ad Council, complements this grassroot effort through national preparedness messaging. The Ready -- by the way, it was a great set of ads -- which I saw previewed and then I saw a couple of them on TV -- in which they went out and they actually talked to families. And they said, do you have a plan for an emergency? And what they did is they talked to like every member of the family separately -- you know, there was the father, the mother, the kids -- and everybody said, oh yes, we have a plan. And then everybody's recitation of the plan was different. And it was great, actually. It was a great self-test, and we tried it at home, and we didn't do that well either. So we have actually now got our kids focused on these issues. And it requires constantly reminding people about it because, you know, you do get distracted with your day-to-day.

But I'll tell you, as someone who lived through 9/11 with my family, and lived through the anthrax attack, and lived through the sniper attack, having a plan and knowing that your kids know what they're supposed to do, for parents is the number one most important concern.

Now, we have a website, www.ready.gov, which has useful information, and it gets quite a lot of hits. And this past September we sponsored our fourth annual National Preparedness Month. More than 14 -- more than 1,700 organizations partnered with us through our Ready campaign in that National Preparedness Month, and hosted various events educating people on preparedness and response.

In addition to reaching out through the Ad Council and these other media campaigns, private sector partners, such as the Council on Competitiveness and the Infrastructure Security Partnership, have worked with us, recognizing that we have to focus on resiliency as well as preparedness -- that means the community's ability to rebound and restore critical government and business functions after a disaster occurs. To that end we've provided funding to organizations like the Southeast Region Research Initiative to study and increase resiliency in our cities and other communities.

Our goal here is to make sure that if, despite the best preventive and preparedness efforts, a disaster strikes, we can get back up and running and recover, as quickly as possible. And some of these efforts are now underway in Mississippi, Tennessee and South Carolina, working to increase community resiliency through SERRI-directed research.

Finally, as we talk about various institutions, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention schools. Schools, in many way, are the network that binds communities most closely together. It gets parents most engaged, and, of course, as we all know, when children become part of the process of educating their parents, that's really a phenomenal engine for information and, frankly, driving good behavior. You know, when we've got kids involved in things like the fire safety campaign or recycling, they're like little relentless engines of propaganda. They never drop it -- they just nag again and again and again about the recycling and stuff. Don't take this as a comment on my family.

But, actually, it's a great lesson. It brings parents around to understanding what they need to do. We need to harness some of that great energy by educating a generation of children to readiness and preparedness -- not to frighten them, but to make sure that part of civic preparation is understanding how you play your role when there is a flood, or an emergency, or some kind of a medical situation, that requires community-based response.

And so we've worked closely with the Department of Education to ensure that schools across the country are engaged with our local Citizen Corps Councils and have the information and guidance, first to make sure they've got good plans, and second to make sure they've got their children engaged and their parents engaged in what they would need to do if, God forbid, we faced some kind of a catastrophe that affected a community and a school structure.

Finally, I want to highlight what is the key foundation element in everything that we're talking about in terms of preparedness -- and that is individual responsibility. We need your leadership at the local level to echo the message that we are sending at the national and state level, which is getting people prepared by getting together a kit of the necessary things that they need, making a plan, and staying informed. You all know that these three principles are the key to responding to any disaster of whatever kind.

Sometimes people think it's complicated. Sometimes people think it's just not going to happen. What we have to do is demystify this. We have to make it clear that this is no different than the kind of preparations a responsible person does before they take, for example, their family on a long vacation trip in the automobile. You know, you check the car, you check the tires, you make sure the automobile is running properly, maybe you take it in for an oil change. This is basic stuff that all of us do and learn to do in order to protect our families with respect to everyday challenges. And now, as you look at the possibility of hurricanes and ice storms and earthquakes, you'll recognize how important it is to build this same mindset, and to make it accessible to people if we're going to survive ice storms and fires and other kinds of catastrophes, and even, God forbid, some kind of medical emergency or a terrorist attack.

Not only do we have to demystify it, but we have to make this part of the morality of public life, part of civic responsibility, because my view is that when able-bodied people take the steps they need to take care of themselves for 48 or 72 hours, what they are doing is they are freeing the first responders to help those who cannot help themselves. On the other hand, if you simply throw your hands up and you don't bother, and you figure someone is going to come and take care of you, then what you're likely doing is distracting a responder who could otherwise be helping someone who can't help themselves. And I think -- so it is really a matter of public morality and civic engagement.

So I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today. I know later this afternoon you'll be hearing from Al Martinez-Fonts, our Assistant Secretary for the Private Sector Office, who's going to get into more detail about what we're doing with our partners in the business community. But most of all, I want to thank you for turning out here, particularly during this season when a lot of you could be out at parties, or shopping, or things of that sort, because this shows your commitment to preparedness, which is really a critical element of everything that we're now doing in public life.

I appreciate your continued support. I appreciate your partnership. I look forward to working with you. I hope you all do have a good holiday season and new year. And I hope that one of your New Year's resolutions is to keep up this dedication in 2008. And now I'll be happy to take some questions

Question: Yes, Secretary Chertoff, first of all, let me thank you for your service. You're making a positive difference in a difficult job. As you go through deciding programs that need your attention, how do you make the determination as to whether something ought to be a federal program emanating out of Washington, D.C., versus finding the best practice out in the community and turning that into a national program?

Secretary Chertoff: That is a great question, which strikes at the heart of one of the most challenging parts of the job. I think we all recognize -- although it's sometimes hard to know whether people in Washington will share this view -- that the federal government really can't be and shouldn't be the nanny for everything; to take care of everything directly. First of all, it would be astronomically expensive, but beyond that, it would really take the decision-making out of the hands of people who know best of what is the right way to implement things, and put it in a remote bureaucracy in Washington.

I think the genius of our system is an appropriate level of responsibility for the appropriate task. So let me divide it into three categories.

I think for most of what we do, in terms of protecting and responding and even preventing, a lot of the responsibility has to be in the hands of the private sector and local communities. That's because they know what is best and what works best. Now, we can do a couple things. We can lay out some guidance to the right way to do things. We can convey information that gives people a sense of what the threats are and what the challenges are, and what works and what doesn't. We can help facilitate network-sharing. We can even, in some circumstances, put down performance standards, like we're doing with the chemical industry, for example.

But in the end, we don't want to micromanage. We want to say, here's what you need to be able to do, here's the right way to do it -- or, here's the right kinds of things you have to be able to do, but you decide what is the best way to actually implement it based upon your knowledge and your experience about how to get things done in your community or your business.

Now, this is not -- you know, doesn't satisfy those who enjoy or believe that the only way to deal with an issue is what I call "Soviet-style" management, where there's that heavy hand of government on everything. But I do think it's particularly apt in the 21st-century world, which is a world of networking, which is not hierarchical.

The second stage is dealing with matters that ought to be really state responsibilities, particularly in the area of prevention where we're dealing, again, with concerns about home-grown terrorism. In many cases, the challenges are what we would call "low-signature threats" -- threats that may not be detectable from spies and satellites, but require community-based policing and community-based knowledge to detect and deter and prevent threats before they come into effect. Because of that, again, we don't want to have the federal government become the choke point to which all this information has to pass before action takes place. That's why we're supporting fusion centers, including fusion centers with responders as well as police officials, so that states and localities can take action quickly to address issues. Now, we want to be able to have visibility into that, we want to share information up and down, but we don't want to slow up the process.

Finally, we do recognize there are some matters that are national responsibilities, and those ought to be areas where we do get our hands dirty and our boots on the ground, so that while with respect to the other categories of information our role could be to enable, to assist, to give information, to set standards, and to help fund, in the area of national priorities, we actually have to be operators, and we have to focus and make sure we can do those operational incidents.

What do those include? Well, it includes securing our borders; that's why we're putting a lot of effort into that. It includes looking at high-consequence terrorists attacks that could have a national or at least a regional impact; that's where we do use the tools of our intelligence community. It involves really catastrophic responses that overwhelm local and state government; and that's why we're doing planning with the National Guard and the military for the first time in a way we've never done before, so that in that kind of emergency, we really could step in and play a national role.

I think by keeping a different step of strategies for the appropriate level, we are maximizing our scope and we're minimizing our intrusiveness and the heavy hand of Washington.

Question: First of all, thank you for coming to our memorial service for our Charleston 9. With several national disasters that I've responded to, it seems like -- that I have come back to the Charleston area and talked to some of the police chiefs and one of the fire chiefs that's here now, and there's been a level of frustration in that they haven't gotten permission to deploy because of a hierarchy of say, 50,000 feet up. But with those of us that are on the ground, we see a need to go ahead and get these -- those folks in. Has there been consideration, sir, to go ahead and have some agencies pre-approved for when a disaster hits to go ahead and get them in motion so they can them -- there quickly?

Secretary Chertoff: Yes, well, that's a very good question. We are working on exactly that issue. I had a meeting with some of the law enforcement folks a few weeks ago. We're looking to support an expansion of the EMAC concept -- Emergency Compact concept -- that would allow state and local law enforcement -- basically, a pre-arranged deployment -- to assist. We have, you know, this concept under things like our Urban Search and Rescue teams. The idea would be to extend it to the law enforcement community as well. That will require some things like credentialing, which we're working on, as well, and some training, because the authorities are a little bit different. It becomes a little challenging because your police authorities don't necessarily translate into another community.

But we are working on precisely that. I think in the long term, we should bring to the -- across the entire spectrum of response capabilities the kinds of interstate, compact relationships that we have with our Urban Search and Rescue and some of our other disaster management.

Question: Thank you, sir.

Secretary Chertoff: I think I have time for one more.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Secretary. Thank you for serving our country. I represent Mercy Medical Airlift and Angel Flight. We have over 7,000 volunteer pilots nationwide and we have provided almost 3,000 missions for -- in support of Katrina and Rita. DHS gave us a very large grant to organize civil aviation response in this country to disasters, and we have run head-first into a bureaucracy that we cannot finish the project. We have done our side. DHS and FEMA won't cooperate with us. Could you help us complete this?

Secretary Chertoff: Sure, I will be happy to look into it. I don't know --

Question: Could I give you some information that I have here?

Secretary Chertoff: Yes, someone will have to pick it up. I'll find out what the story is with that.

Question: Thank you very much, sir.

Secretary Chertoff: I'll be happy to.

Moderator: Thank you, Mr. Secretary.

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This page was last modified on December 17, 2007