What's wrong with FEMA?

Knight Ridder explains how W ruined it:

WASHINGTON - Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, who on Friday was sent back to Washington, is the poster boy for what's gone wrong with an agency once lauded for its lightning reflexes.
The nation's federal disaster agency has been politicized and dismantled over the past four years and Brown is a symptom of that transformation, said disaster- and government-efficiency experts.
The Bush administration has filled FEMA's top jobs with political patronage appointees with no emergency-management experience, cut disaster-preparedness budgets and marginalized the agency by merging it with the new anti-terrorism bureaucracy, according to those experts, which include four former senior FEMA officials. The number of career disaster-management professionals in senior FEMA jobs has been cut by more than 50 percent since 2000, federal personnel records show.