Emergency Management versus Homeland Security
Emergency Management versus Homeland Security : "Deciphering Specialties: Emergency management and homeland security are not the same, nor are they two differing views of the same core competencies. They draw on some of the same supporting specialties, they are both multidisciplinary by definition and regularly overlap, especially at the operational or post-event level. To use a very crude and rather limited set of comparisons: (1) Emergency management is very local and is about preserving life, property and, with voter approved limitations, ensuring freedom. (2) Homeland security starts as far from home as possible and is about denying freedom to those who believe violence and intimidation are legitimate means to an end. (3) Building on that, emergency management is a specific and critical function of local government, while homeland security is essentially, but not solely, a federal government function. (4) Using a different lens, emergency management focuses on science, facts and the environment in its broadest sense, while homeland security focuses on people, beliefs and ideology?.. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) absorbed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) including FEMA's mission, but has yet to figure out how to manage that mission. In crafting the DHS, Congress has created a multibillion dollar funding stream for training, education and research, but it also consistently uses language that has forced everyone - not just academic institutions - to alter their product offerings so they meet what are basically arbitrary, and oftentimes capricious, homeland security definitions terms, and conditions - not emergency management definitions, terms and conditions. The size of that funding stream and the limiting language that the DHS adopted has led to the creation of many new programs in homeland security. This is all well and good, but unfortunately the larger effect has been a slowdown in emergency management funding, the forcing of many institutions to reconfigure existing and planned emergency management programs to look like homeland security programs so they qualify for DHS money, and the general de-emphasis on the critical importance of a separate emergency management discipline - all to further solidify a DHS supremacy?. Neither discipline is inherently more important or better than the other. The issue is determining your strengths and deciding how or where you want to grow?. If you want to help build strong and resilient communities and contribute directly to your community's well-being on a daily basis - whether that community is local, regional or state - then emergency management is the track to pursue. If you want to protect the public from bad people, then homeland security is the track to pursue. (Jaffin, "Education: Emergncy Management and Homeland Security Aren't the Same". Emergency Management (Government Technology), June 27, 2008)
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