An investigation by TIME has found discrepancies in his online legal profile and official bio, including a description of Brown released by the White House at the time of his nomination in 2001 to the job as deputy chief of FEMA.
The weird thing is this: even taking his padded resume at face value, he still wasn’t qualified.
UPDATE: The New York Times also sheds some snarky light on Brown’s FEMA deputies:
The Chicago Tribune reported on Wednesday that neither the acting deputy director, Patrick Rhode, nor the acting deputy chief of staff, Brooks Altshuler, came to FEMA with any previous experience in disaster management. Ditto for Scott Morris, the third in command until May.
Mr. Altshuler and Mr. Rhode had worked in the White House’s Office of National Advance Operations.
Those are the people who decide where the president will stand on stage and which loyal supporters will be permitted into the audience – and how many firefighters will be diverted from rescue duty to surround the president as he patrols the New Orleans airport trying to look busy.
And MSNBC, in an article appropriately subtitled "Agency has suffered ‘brain drain’ since 2001", sums in up thusly:
Five of eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
***
[E]xperts inside and out of government said a "brain drain" of experienced disaster hands throughout the agency, hastened in part by the appointment of leaders without backgrounds in emergency management, has weakened the agency’s ability to respond to natural disasters. Some security experts and congressional critics say the exodus was fueled by a bureaucratic reshuffling in Washington in 2003, when FEMA was stripped of its independent Cabinet-level status and folded into the Department of Homeland Security.
Emergency preparedness has atrophied as a result, some analysts said, extending from Washington to localities.
"[FEMA] has gone downhill within the department, drained of resources and leadership," said I.M. "Mac" Destler, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. "The crippling of FEMA was one important reason why it failed."
I’m no policy expert, but it seems to me that one of the lessons of 9/11 was that we needed to beef up the nation’s ability to respond to disasters, not dumb it down. Am I crazy for thinking that?