Another Enthralling Post: The FEMA and CNCS Budgets

At some point during the last couple of years, I started getting into one of the most arcane things in the federal government: the budget. Given that I’m now a government employee, working for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) via funding provided by FEMA, I thought it meet to go and explore the money that CNCS and FEMA get to do what they do. Here, then, are the numbers, straight from the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2012.

CNCS

The CNCS gets $751,672,000 for operating expenses. $82,834,000 of that is earmarked for carrying out provisions of the National and Community Service Act of 1990, whatever they are. The National Service Trust (NST) gets $212,198,000. The NCCC brass can also transfer funds from “Operating Expenses” to grants administered by the trust, as long as those grants support people engaged in national service. $83,000,000 is earmarked for administrative salaries and expenses, and $4,000,000 is for the Inspector General’s office (again, whatever that is).

The bill also contains several administrative provisions. The first one prohibits hanky-panky in the grant awarding process: nobody gets to know until the selections are announced, and significant changes to the process or requirements have to be made in public view. Another mandates that Americorps programs getting NST grants have to pick up 24% of the cost (I’m assuming that’s what “minimum share requirement” means) for the first three years that they have a grant. Afterwards, they have to meet some overall minimum share requirement specified under federal law. A third says that donations “shall be used to supplement and not support current programs and operations”, and a fourth stipulates that only veterans of Americorps programs get the education award that we’ll be eligible for after successfully completing this program.

I don’t have the numbers for FY2012, but in FY2010 the entire Americorps NCCC program—five campuses, 1,200 members, administrative staff, food stipend for a year, vehicles, miscellaneous expenses, etc., etc., cost just $29 million. In government terms, you can find that kind of money down the back of the sofa. I’ve heard our TLs say that training each regular Americorps member costs $24,000; my campus director of operations (DDO) says it’s more like $27,000 when you take the cost of renting the campus into account. FEMA Corps members, the TLs say, cost $36,000 because of the two extra weeks of FEMA training we do. According to my campus DDO, the FEMA Corps budget is still confidential, and I don’t feel like filing a Freedom of Information Act request to pry it out. However, the $29 million mark at least establishes a ballpark figure. I’d be surprised if the total cost of FEMA Corps was over $40-45 million—which, again, comes through CNCS but from FEMA.

Anyway, when you put together all the numbers, the CNCS gets $1,040,870,000 to fund Americorps, Senior Corps and Learn and Serve America (LSA), its three main programs. That’s FY2012. In FY2010, Americorps VISTA got $99,074,000, while LSA got $39.5m. Americorps NCCC, as I mentioned, got $29 million that year.

FEMA

The Federal Emergency Management Agency gets $895,350,000 for salaries and general expenses. $41.25 million of that is for the Urban Search and Rescue System, $5.493m for the Office of National Capital Region Coordination, $12m for improvements at the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, and $13.662m for modernizing automated systems. $1,349,681,000 is for “grants, contracts, cooperative agreements, and other activities”; $50m goes to Operation Stonegarden and $100m for areas with a high risk of terrorist attack. The bill earmarks $231,681,000 for “training, exercises, technical assistance, and other programs, of which $155,500,000 shall be for training of State, local, and tribal emergency response providers.” One would assume that the Center for Domestic Preparedness is funded out of that pot.

An additional $675,000,000 is federal firefighting and protection funding, $350,000,000 is for emergency management performance grants, $44,038,000 for the United States Fire Administration and firefighting purposes, $700,000,000 for carrying out the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act--$24,000,000 of which is earmarked for the Inspector General for audits and investigations. Another $295,000 is for the costs of direct loans, authorized under the Stafford Act. $97,712,000 is for expenses incurred under the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968, plus whatever state and local governments want to chip in for “cost-shared activities”.

 $171,000,000 goes to the National Flood Insurance Fund (NFIF). Apparently there’s an immense amount of money in the NFIF; The cap that you can take out in a given year is $132m for “operating expenses”, $1.07 billion and change for “commissions and taxes of agents”, $60m for flood mitigation and unlimited for interest on treasury borrowing. $35,500,000 is available under the Stafford Act for pre-disaster mitigation grants as well as $120,000,000 for emergency food and shelter.

That’s $4,418,596,000 by my count. In addition, in a different appropriations bill, Congress authorized $2.65 billion for immediate disaster relief (to be meted out by the director of FEMA within 15 days). That brings the total to $7,068,596,000 by my count, give or take a few million. Some of that pot has presumably funded FEMA Corps, from its inception as an idea of deputy FEMA administrator Richard Sorino to the present day (and far beyond).

Absolutely Nothing Happened Today, So I Wrote About NCCC Food. Enjoy.

Today I sat around and waited in, around and outside the Center for Domestic Preparedness for a non-exaggerated total of probably six hours. Outside of that, winning the solitaire trifecta (clock, Klondike, 7x5 faceup) and getting our equipment, nothing happened. So I’ll share what I wrote on the van ride yesterday: food. I figure I’ve written about plenty of graduation ceremonies and ropes courses, so it’s gotta be time for something incredibly mundane (yet terrifying).

The NCCC budgets $4.75 per person per day for food; that is what you live on. All of that money is pooled and put in the hands of your Team Leader; for a ten-person team like mine, that’s $47.50 a day. It’s doled out weekly, which pushes the amount up to $332.50. That buys weekly supplies, almost always purchased at Wal-Mart, and invariably made up of that store’s “Great Value” generic items. (I’ve joked before that the entire NCCC program is really just an indirect subsidy for the local Wal-Mart.)

 NCCC staples include wheat bread, pasta, macaroni‘n’cheese, salad that comes in a bag, drink powder that turns water into lemonade, frozen pizzas, occasional chicken breasts and sundry fruits and vegetables. Generic pasta is the most popular meal, made with store-bought sauce; tacos and rice are also quite common. All of these things are paid for with government dollars, tax-exempt, which REALLY helps one shop within the budget. Going over budget isn’t the end of the world, though. It’s pretty much expected in your first week on spike, for example, when you’re also buying base ingredients like salt or olive oil or ketchup. Now, it is possible to stay under budget until the end of an accounting period and then just have an extravagant meal at the end; you’re not allowed to roll over money into the next accounting period, as I understand it, so you might as well spend it while you can.

Cooking and cleaning duties are generally divvied up amongst the team. My temporary team had a four-person rotation per night; two people cook, two people clean for every dinner. You cook one night a week, clean one night a week and then have three nights free (on weekends, people generally fended for themselves during NCCC training). On my permanent team, that’s been shifted to one cook, one cleaner, at least in theory. In practice, we’ve had relatively few sit-down team dinners; everyone had different schedules and our kitchen wasn’t big enough to accommodate everyone, so most people just followed their own schedules and ate whatever. This week, John made minestrone and Mariah made tater tot casserole, both of which were welcome changes. I’ve cooked once since getting here, a valiant attempt at homemade salad dressing and pasta sauce that mostly just came out bland. I prefer cleaning anyway; it’s less stressful.

All of the above is daily life, but there are some outliers. For example, today is a travel day, during which our budget jumps up to $15 per person per day. (During the aftermath of Hurricane Isaac, when our power was out, we also got $15/person/day until the lights came back on.) That’s supposed to allow for three meals, but it doesn’t always work that way; on Friday, we only had to pay for one meal—breakfast was our stuff, dinner at Anniston was provided—and we went to, ugggh, Taco Bell. We each had $15 to spend… at Taco Bell. The amount of crappy food we ate as a team was just overwhelming. My friend Joe bought an entire cake there and, as of this writing, has eaten half of it.

We were lucky enough, as a Corps, to have the whole first week catered by a local Vicksburg catering company. During our two weeks at Anniston, which started today, we will also be catered to by the good people of the Center for Domestic Preparedness. Beyond that, NCCC is expected to take care of itself the rest of the time, absent random events like church dinners or barbecues thrown by the city of Vicksburg. I’d never had ribs before, and I’m now wondering how on earth I went 22 years without them.

That’s NCCC food. I’ve spoken in glowing terms about how we’re being trained in all sorts of ways for whatever may come our way and whatever whatever, but when you look at that aspect of our lives, we’re really being trained extensively for one more thing: bachelorhood or spinsterhood. At least I’ll have experience as a dishwasher when it comes time to look for a career path. (Kidding. Mostly.)

We Have Infiltrated FEMA's Sanctum Sanctorium...

...and all that's here is some well-manicured grass, large brick dorms, immaculate sidewalks and all manner of amenities and visitor-center stuff. Somewhat ominously, the fences don't have barbed wire, but foot-long curved spikes pointing outward. In other words, they keep people out, but if you really really need to flee, i.e. over the walls, the spikes won't keep you in.

I actually have no idea what's here, since we've yet to actually do anything. I just wanted to put this up to let folks know that FEMA Corps has officially migrated. Like birds in winter, we fled to the... east (shush, I'm tired) to the magical land of Anniston, Alabama, in the middle of a government facility.

So far, it's very nice. The staff was insanely accomodating--my group was the last of five, and we got there an hour late due to an overlong tour at another FEMA facility in Jackson, MS. Their cafeteria staff had supposedly long since finished up, but they brought out 33 boxes of pure Gulf Coast food--ribs, baked potato, crab still in the shell--and five or six staff members had stuck around to help with our initial processing. For the first time, somebody else was being "FEMA flexible" on our behalf instead of the reverse!

Adding to the good impressions, the facilities look quite nice. The rooms are basically hotel rooms: nice bathroom, TV, one good bed (we're two CMs to a room, thus somebody gets a cot), one giant black refrigerator that dominates the room like the monolith at the end of 2001. We have access to a computer lab and wi-fi, which I'm using in concert to type up this blog; there's a volleyball court, numerous gyms, the best foosball table I've ever seen and a storage locker filled with bikes. And that's just on the housing campus where I am right now; the Center for Domestic Preparedness is friggin' massive.

So yeah. We don't actually start training until Tuesday, but the next three days will be consumed with in-processing activities, from getting our FEMA badges to our training on the security protocols here to our FEMA equipment. Each of us will be getting a FEMA-issued laptop, which comes in a 20-pound case that could survive a cruise missile attack, a Blackberry and some sort of government internet chip, to aid us in our various specialist tasks. I should be getting a camera as well, since I'm a media rep, so I can better document what we're doing. (They want us to put up one blog post per week. I wrote 3,700 words today on the way here, not counting this post.)

That's the news from the Center for Domestic Preparedness, of which we have seen only a tiny piece thus far. We have wi-fi all throughout the campus here, so I should be able to post daily (I have a TON of mostly non-NCCC stuff backed up because I've been limiting myself to a post a day) for the next two weeks. Breakfast is at 0545 tomorrow morning, so now is already past my bedtime. Goodnight internet!

I Am Officially a Member of the National Civilian Community Corps

Today was it: the biggest day of the last five weeks, one of the biggest events--pomp and circumstance-wise anyway--of our service lives. Today is the day that the first-ever class of FEMA Corps Members officially became part of NCCC. There was a color guard, an Americhoir singing the national anthem (I sang in that), an Ameriband crooning Queen's "Somebody to Love" (I sang along to that), and all of our High Overlords giving speeches to a crowd of royal blue FEMA Corps T-shirts. We heard from Wendy Spencer, the CEO of the CNCS; we heard from Richard Serino, deputy administrator of FEMA; we heard from Charles Davenport, our temporary Region Director; we listened to Kate Raftery, the head of NCCC, and half a dozen other speakers. There were thanks, well-wishes, analogies and congratulations in all of those speeches, but one line in particular caught my ear and eye.

I believe it was Mr. Serino who mentioned the word 'sacrifice', as in the sacrifice that we're making by joining FEMA Corps. And I guess it is considerable; ten months of our lives, working for little pay and in lousy (literally, I bet) conditions, when we could be out in the world starting our permanent careers and living life the way lots of 20-somethings want to? My friend and unit-mate Michael struck a similar note on Tuesday night, speaking to a stuffed Corps after the City of Vicksburg's delicious barbecue had vanished into our stomachs. He spoke about the sacrifices that members of the military are asked to make, and challenged us to think about what more we could--or would--sacrifice in our lives for the sake of doing good.

Listening to both Michael and Mr. Serino, a "sacrifice" seemed to be the act of making a concession. You give up something for the good of others and to help others; you're being selfless, noble, honorable. But you see, I've been playing chess for most of my life, and chess has its own special language. Within that language, the word "sacrifice" means something entirely different; in a game of chess, you sacrifice a piece in order to gain an advantage, even win the game outright. In other words, you sacrifice what you have in order to gain what you need.

I think that definition is much closer to the truth of what we're doing. Yes, we're leaving behind worldly comforts and glittering prizes, but the members of FEMA Corps Class 19 aren't truly giving up anything. We've traded our old lives for something fresh and new, and there's not a person in the Corps who hasn't bought into our mission. We're doing righteous work, helping people in their times of great need, and learning an amazing amount about ourselves and each other along the way. Give up? We're gaining everything. What we give to FEMA Corps will be repaid a hundred times over in friendship, experience, knowledge and good works. As FEMA Corps packs its bags and prepares to head to Anniston for training, it's my firm belief that we've given up nothing. A fantastic year is just around the corner, and you can't put a price on what we're about to experience.

How to Be a Better Human: NCCC's Renaissance Men and Women

Four weeks of NCCC training are almost completely in the books. Our structured classes ended for good a week and a half ago; last Monday was a training on how to approach and aid people with disabilities, and then we headed off to Camp Lake Stephens to put our training to work. This week so far has mostly been loose ends and cleanup before our induction ceremony on Friday, when we become full-fledged NCCC Corps Members. (We’ll still have two weeks of FEMA training after that, but I’ll take my victories where I find ‘em.)

Looking back and taking stock, I’m struck—I was struck at the time—by how much of the training was focused on making us better, more well-rounded human beings. Traditional NCCC gives you project-specific training when you go out on spike, so I guess it makes sense that so much of the in-class training focused on the intangibles of how to live with one’s team. There were some very tangible classes—CPR/First Aid and van driving, for two—but they were far outnumbered by what I like to call the “Don’t be a dick” and “don’t be a dumbass” units.

Those are exactly what they sound like: how to live with your team and interact with others without screwing up. They were essentially reinforcing our common sense. Don’t send emails in an unprofessional manner; be courteous, polite and good-natured. Remember that what you’re doing matters, and do all you can to learn why. How to eat properly on a very low budget, conduct yourself ethically and properly, how to solve your issues with other Corps Members. Understanding and appreciating and allowing for diversity. Maintaining a high quality of life. We learned how to write in an office setting or work with the elderly or, as I mentioned, work with the disabled. There are numerous others, all equally holistic.

All of these trainings have two complementary purposes. Yes, they’re preparing us for everything we might encounter Out There in the big, disaster-hit world of spikes and sleeping in tents, and they’re teaching us how to live with the same people for nine months and not go shithouse crazy (I suspect that’ll be considerably more important than we think). But they’re also fulfilling half of that NCCC motto: “Strengthening communities, developing leaders”. The considerable investment of time and money spent on us (Americorps NCCC spent $29 million in FY2010, as an example) is expected to pay off in us. You don’t show young people the world and expect them to quit after a year; you’re recruiting the best and the brightest! We’re not supposed to do a year of NCCC and then go forget everything we’ve learned; we’re supposed to take what we’ve learned and go use it after 2012.

Yes, it’s holistic and can feel very soft at times, as if we were learning how to be namby-pamby goodie-goodies instead of spending more time on what we’re actually going to be doing. Well, that part is getting started three days from now. FEMA is holding down the job we’re actually going to do; NCCC is more invested in how we’ll do it and who we’ll be afterwards. As a practical-minded person, I’m impatient for the FEMA training to finally get here. As a participant-observer of and in the program, I’m glad to see that we get the NCCC training as well.

9/11 and the National Day of Service: My Take

To be totally honest, I didn't even know there was such a thing as a National Day of Service on September 11th. I'd never heard of the "I Will" campaign, never seen an ad for it, never witnessed volunteers helping at my school or in my community. But apparently not only does it exist, but it mobilized as many as 33 million people last year who all went out and served in their communities or just decided to be kind to a stranger or a friend that day. Today, on 9/11/12, NCCC's Southern Campus held a 9/11 reflection meeting, then went out into Vicksburg and even all the way to Jackson for a day of community service.

It's a little strange to think about, because neither 9/11 nor the succeeding War on Terror have directly affected my life. I live a thousand miles from New York and D.C. and Shanksville, PA. I know very few members of the military personally and have none, at least of this generation, in my immediate family. Ditto firefighters, ditto-ditto policemen and emergency medical personnel. My taxes haven't appreciably increased because of the war, I have not been and am unlikely to be discriminated against in this country because of the 9/11 attacks, and while I've maintained a deep and lasting interest in 9/11 and the Afghan and Iraq Wars, they have yet to reach out and touch me. (Thank God.) I was in sixth grade when the Twin Towers fell, and at the time the death and destruction was impossible for me to understand. I simply couldn't concieve of death and suffering on that scale. Eleven years later, the events of 9/11 remain more historical than visceral to me.

I guess, to put it simply, I always focused on the results of the attack--two wars, an expanded national security complex, a new Cabinet department, a renewed and enhanced emphasis on secrecy, defense and security, and an ever-increasing number of bodies overseas--ours and theirs alike. The visceral, emotional impact upon a country that once seemed untouchable on its own soil (it had been almost 60 years since Pearl Harbor and 191 since the War of 1812) was lost on me. I guess this relates to my post about the long-term impact of disaster relief, where I focused once again on details instead of human stories. I never would have imagined something so widespread as a National Day of Service, designed to retake September 11th and make it a day of help instead of a tragedy, engaging people from coast to coast.

And yet, it makes sense. It actually makes a ton of sense. All of my associations with 9/11 are either absent or negative--bad foreign policy, bad domestic policy, a decade of war with no clear end or victory--because that's what the attacks inspired. The half-joke half-serious line in the years immediately following 9/11 was "...or the terrorists win". We do this, or the terrorists win. We go out and hit them in their heartland, or the terrorists win. But through our foreign invasions and occupations and all the death and sadness they caused, we handed them the biggest victory they could've hoped for. We became the enemy for millions of people. The history of 9/11 is not complete, would never be complete, without everything that that horrible day inspired in us.

But I said everything, not just our decade-long counterattack. The events of 9/11 have also inspired countless people to do good in whatever way they think best. The National Day of Service is about kindness, not vengeance... about service, not justice... and about the strengthening of life, not the punishment of death. It says 'You can't beat us because we're not even playing the same game. We're turning the other cheek. We're choosing to make ourselves stronger, not to give you the vengeance you want. We're taking the wound you gave us and making it a badge of honor and service.' The National Day of Service is our attempt to replace the memories of war and vengeance with a spirit of brotherhood, country-hood and service of those who deserve our thanks.

And so the members of the National Civilian Community Corps, like millions of like-minded Americans around the country, took time out today to reflect, remember and offer our aid. I washed squad cars at the Vicksburg Police Department and chatted with members of the force. Some of my fellow Corps Members went to the Vicksburg Fire Department or to local  elementary schools; others served in other communities with other First Responders. We served all around this community, and we will--a few minutes from now--attend a community barbecue thrown to honor the service of the citizens of Vicksburg and of the NCCC. Helping, healing and serving are the watchwords of the day. Together with reflection and rememberance, I can't think of better.

My Latter Two Days at Camp Lake Stephens

"Editor's" note: Excuse the present tense; this was written contemporaneously with and describes Thursday-Friday of last week.

After an eminently memorable first day, the second two days of our Camp Lake Stephens were… decent. It’s kind of odd. After a day clearing underbrush, I found myself really really wanting to write about them and tell the story of that day, because it was a profoundly unique feeling, a real NCCC memory. What we did yesterday and today was fun and dynamic and unique in its own right, but it didn’t leave me thinking “Wow! That was amazing, I have to tell everyone I know!” in the same way that Day One did. Maybe that’s my standards being unrealistically high, I don’t know.

In any case, Day Two would’ve been called fun by even the stingiest summer-camp participant. We did a low-ropes course and a high-ropes course. The low-ropes courses focused on teamwork; you had to fit everybody through the (rather small) holes in a man-made spiderweb of ropes, or get everyone to swing on a rope swing across an (imaginary) highway and land safely on the other side. It was okay, I guess. This connects to the Myers-Briggs personality tests we just took, I suppose, but I would’ve welcomed a little less standing and talking about the course and more “Let’s do something and see if it works!”. Perhaps correspondingly, my favorite of the four was when we were all mute, standing on a log, and had to arrange ourselves in a specific order (our birthdays, Jan-Dec).

The high-ropes courses, on the other hand, were all about individual achievement. We did a “flying squirrel”, in which—through the magic of lines and pulleys—one person (the squirrel) stood on one end of a rope, five strong team members were clipped to the other end of the rope, and the point was for the Five to run and yank the rope as hard as they could and send the squirrel flying as high as possible. That was terrific fun; I was one of the Five for about seven squirrels before getting my turn, and it’s like a giant eagle just picks you up and yanks you into the air. There was also a rock wall with a wicked incline at the top (I couldn’t quite make it, failing two handholds from the top, to my immense irritation) and The Pole, a highlight to end all highlights.

The Pole is simple in design, difficult in execution. The chosen one is equipped with helmet, harness and safety line and made to climb up a thirty-foot pole (handholds and footholds provided. Once at the top of the pole, they will see a trapeze suspended in the air about 5-6 feet in front of them. The objective, of course, is to jump and grab the trapeze.

Plenty of people were scared; perhaps two-thirds of my team required some sort of coaxing from the ground before making their attempt. I wasn’t scared at the top, at least not of falling; I just remember thinking “Okay, I have one shot, so I better not miss.” Didn’t help all that much.  I did not make it. After a sort of swimmer’s dive off the top of the pole, I fell about a foot short by my estimate, never touching the confounded thing. A very, very few people Corps-wide made it; I would guess about 20-30 out of 240. My teammate Joe actually touched the bar with both hands (he’s 6’4”, which helps a lot) but slipped off because his hands were sweaty—it’s unbelievably hot on top of the Pole. That was easily the high point, figuratively and literally, of yesterday.

Today was the “Amerilympics”, a unit-wide competition in all sorts of things. We had a punt-pass-and-kick with a football, a water balloon toss and subsequent free rein to just go nuts with water balloons, a trivia competition (apparently Ben Franklin died on 4/17/1790), a competition to kick the most soccer balls in a net, a Frisbee accuracy competition (I hit three of five cones myself; no TEAM of 8-12 people totaled more than four), “Dragon tails” (break into two lines of five, last person in line has a tail, get the other guy’s tail before he gets yours) and a three-legged race (Joe and I won within my team, but lost by eight seconds unit-wide). Like I said, it’s all fun enough, but none of it is particularly extraordinary. And perhaps that is an unfair standard, but many of the Corps’s activities have been extraordinary (using it correctly, i.e. much better than ordinary); this was just ordinary.

I’m definitely glad we did it, though. After shepherding each other through various impossible obstacles—and more to the point, just hanging out, living together, swapping music preferences and inside jokes and having long conversations—I definitely feel a lot closer to my teammates now than I did at the start of the weekend. That was the entire point of the exercise, after all, and I’m glad of it.