Infamous Katrina-Era FEMA Chief Says Biden NOT Doing Heckuva Job on Maui Wildfires

Infamous Bush-era FEMA Director Michael “Brownie” Brown has thoughts about President Joe Biden’s response to the Maui wildfire disaster.

The Maui wildfires that have claimed at least 106 lives and caused untold damage to the island have been the subject of an extensive federal response — being overseen on the ground by FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, U.S. Fire Administrator Dr. Lori Moore-Merrell, and U.S. Small Business Administration Administrator Isabella Casillas Guzman — that included a prompt disaster declaration, the deployment of almost 500 federal personnel to Maui, and constant contact by the president with officials in the state.

Biden and First Lady Jill Biden have announced they will travel to the region in five days.

But the president has gotten criticism over the disaster, including from Brown — best known for being told by then-President George W. Bush that he was doing “a heckuva job” overseeing the universally-derided response to Hurricane Katrina. Turns out this is a thing he does when there’s a disaster, goes on TV to complain about the response.

On Thursday night’s edition of NewsNation’s On Balance with Leland Vittert, Brown told host Leland Vittert he found it “infuriating” that Biden wasn’t “working the phones” over the weekend — although according to pool reports Biden was, in fact, working the phones:

LELAND VITTERT: Do you see and you know better than anybody, because you’ve been there, you were asking for those resources. Do you see the awesome power of the federal government being mobilized over the weekend to help the folks in Maui?

MICHAEL “BROWNIE” BROWN: No. And again, you know, I’m a little reticent, reticent to criticize because I know what it’s to be, what it’s like to be on the end of that criticism. But what I’ve learned so far as we have urban search and rescue, urban search and rescue team task force from, I think, Indiana, California, Washington. There may be a few others. But, you know, on 9/11 and not to compare this to 9/11 necessarily, but we had every single urban search and rescue team at either Ground Zero or at the Pentagon. And I’ve heard that, well, the cadaver dogs and the rescue dogs have to be you know, they have to rest and they have to take time out, which they absolutely do. I remember throwing tennis balls for dogs that were resting after not finding any bodies inside the Pentagon. But we should have every available dog. If only 28% or 25%, whatever the figure is, has actually been searched? They need more dogs and they should be there.

I also heard the state senator talk about how they’re not getting the resources, you know, what they need to do? They need to take a C5A, be it at the time we used to call them MERS mobile emergency response system. And they need to take some of those units, put on a C5A somehow, if they have to use a Chinook helicopter, whatever, get those on Maui, establish a command post on Maui, not Honolulu. And then when I heard the president talk about he has been talking to the governor about when he should travel? no, you should be talking to the governor about what do you need? Or better yet. The right question is, Governor, what are you not getting? And then turn to your FEMA director and say the governor tells me he’s not getting this. Well, the FEMA director should already know this, but that’s the conversations that should be taking place. I just find it infuriating.

LELAND VITTERT: Yeah. I think about in fact, more infuriating because we know this playbook, right? Conceivably after Katrina, we should, we should have learned from it and understood how sometimes all of a sudden, something that appears to be sad but under control turns into devastating and out of control.

…I still can’t get out of my mind. The video of people in the water needing rescue, Americans jumping into the water just like it undoes me. But this would be my question: over the weekend. I’m wondering what the president could have been doing? Because the White House says, you know, he can monitor things from everywhere. What could he have been doing that you didn’t see him doing?

MICHAEL “BROWNIE” BROWN: He could have been working the phones. He could have been working the phones to every person in Hawaii. You’ve got a state homeland security director. You probably have an emergency manager. You’ve got the governor. You’ve got state senators. He should be on the phone to every single one of those. Finding out from them what’s going on. And the other thing that’s driving me nuts is you’ve got to be on the ground in order to actually manage a disaster. You have got to be in the middle of that disaster because things go wrong. That’s what we call them, disasters. So you’ve got to have a command unit in the disaster area.

Watch above via NewsNation’s On Balance with Leland Vittert.