It seems the folks in government tasked with dealing with emergency management are behaving like angry cats in a bag. Part of their problem is not seeing that homeland security and emergency response reflect two very different world views. They should be the responsiblity of two separate organizations who can talk to each other rather than one organization talking only to itself. Perhaps there should be one person with a small staff responsible for herding the cats, or at least informing the county of where the cats are. But planning for and responding to disasters should in no way be the responsibility of any organization responsible for guarding our borders and our airports. Create that organization and you have created a dysfunctionally schizophrenic organization. 

For the most part, states do not want any part of enforcing immigration laws. They don't want to know who is living in them. They don't want fences around them. They don't want to be looking into peoples' citizenship and ratting out possible illegals to to Feds. When they do try to help with national security, they have their hands slapped by the courts or the Feds for overstepping their authority.

They also don't want the National Guard to be showing up on their doorsteps unnannounced whenever a storm or fire wipes out a town or two. Think about how long it has taken Minneapolis to ask for help from the Navy, the organization with the world's foremost underwater disaster response capability. (Note that local governments do not need to be inhibited when it comes to bigger government elements. When a tanker truck crashed on the 7 Mile Bridge and threatened to sever the only road running through Monroe County (the Florida Keys), it took about two hours for the County and the Navy to work together to bring in Navy equipment capable of handling crashed tanker trucks as well as crashed war planes.)

I think the Department of Homeland Security should be responsible for risk assessment relative to our national security, specifically threats of violence from malevolent human forces inside and outside the country. HSA should run the borders, the airports, and have the FBI, the NSA, the National Guard, the Coast Guard, and the CIA, and should be able do their business here and abroad, borrow local police when they are needed, and coordinate with our military forces overseas and with foreign armies and police when necessary.

HSA should keep FEMA and state and local governments and response organizations such as the American Red Cross informed of potential threats.

Other relevant government agencies should keep FEMA and state and local governments and the Red Cross informed of threats from natural disasters such as storms, fires, earthquakes and, if you must, climate change.

FEMA should be reponsible for risk assessment relative to both natural and man-made disasters, for response planning at the national level, for obtaining and maintaining its own inventory of response and recovery resources (personnel, tents, water, trailers), and for maintaining access to other resources such as the Red Cross and the National Guard.

Each state should have its own plan based on its own unique needs and resources and should probably have its own little FEMA to do at the state level what FEMA does at the national level.

The national emergency plan should concisely describe the resources of the relevant organization and how they intend to carry out their responsibilities. Most importantly, it should define how each will keep the others informed of what it knows and what it is doing.

Maybe we need an emergency Zar (Tzar and Czar are not good words). His/her job would be to look for and fill any holes in the plan by improving coordination and communication, and by acquiring additional resources that might be needed.

After Challenger blew up, NASA centralized project management for the Space Station program in Reston, Virginia rather than assign one of their sites as lead. In the early stages of the design phase of the program, they eliminated that level and went back to how they did business when they built Titan rockets and lauched the Shuttle.

We need to understand that command and control depend on communication and coordination and that improving communication and coordination must be accomplished by improving communication and coordination, not by glomming departments together. What do you have when you take two people in different rooms speaking different languages and you put them in the same room? Two people in the same room speaking different languages.