Be sure to read Part II of the Michael Grunwald and Susan B. Glasser report on the DHS in WaPo. Today they focus on the turf wars between Michael Brown at FEMA and the rest of the Washington establishment. Jaw-dropping stuff. A sample:

Long before his e-mails portrayed a befuddled bureaucrat who fretted about restaurant reservations and his Nordstrom wardrobe while New Orleans drowned, he [Michael Brown] was known at DHS as a fierce turf warrior whose griping about FEMA’s role alienated superiors and marginalized his agency.

“The biggest danger in the department was tribalism,” said Bruce M. Lawlor, Ridge’s initial chief of staff, “and FEMA was the number one tribe.”

In many ways, Brown is a cautionary tale of what can happen to Washington officials who make mistakes in the public eye after making enemies behind the scenes. Brown spent two years trying to use his contacts with White House officials to undercut DHS, but the White House rarely backed him, and DHS leaders responded by shifting FEMA’s responsibilities and resources to more cooperative agencies.

Ridge stripped FEMA’s power over billions of dollars worth of preparedness grants as well as the creation of a national disaster response plan. Most of the agency’s top staff quit. And after he arrived at DHS in February, Chertoff decided to take away the rest of FEMA’s preparedness duties.

Brown was actually right about many things, but the whole Bush bureaucracy is a joke. Chertoff is just as clueless as Brown is; possibly more so. And it is obvious hardly anyone in Washington took disaster preparedness seriously. It was all about power and politics to them.