Originally Posted by JeffMerriman

The government has a very aggressive campaign to standardize coordination of major incidents where resource management becomes a necessity. It's called NIMS (National Incident Management System). All levels of local, state, and federal government are being trained to follow a standardized incident management format right down to the forms. It streamlines the processes and transitions. It's not fullproof and certainly has it's issues but it's much better than anything we have ever had.

And FEMA falls under Homeland Security. And in my opinion the Department of Homeland Security was a massive wasted of taxpayer dollars. The Bush administration simply added layers of government and bureaucracy to an already overtaxed and underfunded group of agencies that simply needed more coordination and information sharing in order to accomplish the goals DHS was set out to meet.