Doesn't this sound like a job for Brownie?

If there's anything FEMA knows how to do, surely
it's taking care of emergency housing needs.

With the District of Columbia girding for the inauguration onslaught, our pal Al Kamen reports in an "In the Loop" item called "Brownie, We Hardly Knew Ye" that "the Federal Emergency Management Agency is on the case, ready to make sure everything works out," except for one small hitch:

In preparing for the worst -- an attack on millions of Obama's guests on Jan. 20 -- FEMA seems to have forgotten to plan for its own.

FEMA managers apparently will require 50 to 60 workers on Inauguration Day to staff the National Response Coordination Center, just steps from the Mall. But we're told the brains behind the operation have not given employees any clues as to plans for feeding, sheltering and transporting them amid the chaos that will consume downtown Washington.

"There are no plans for feeding people, sheltering people -- anything," said Leo Bosner, head of FEMA's employees union. "Given the poor planning we've seen out of our bosses the last couple of years, we're kind of worried."

FEMA spokeswoman Debbie Wing said it is not 100 percent certain that the agency will staff the downtown facility, and FEMA is considering staffing response coordinators at an alternative facility in the suburbs. Nonetheless, Wing said, managers will ensure that employees have what they need.

"We have made contingency plans for food and meals for the employees to be catered and also made accommodations for facilities, showers and cots and blankets," Wing said.

So everyone just calm down. FEMA will naturally share those plans with its employees. There's still more than a month to go.

Say, I'll bet the current FEMA management could lay its hands on a supply of trailers -- by February or March.


SPEAKING OF FEMA, AL ALSO REPORTS . . .

. . . that much-admired Clinton-era FEMA Director James Lee Witt "has taken himself out of the running -- apparently for business and personal reasons."

Witt is said to be backing Mark Merritt, an ex-FEMA official who now works for Witt in their consulting firm. Former congressman Nick Lampson (D-Tex.), who won -- and then lost -- the House seat that former majority leader Tom DeLay once held, had been looking at the FEMA slot, we were told, but is now drifting toward some other options.

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