Former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge was warned in 2003 that under his plan to reorganize the department, the Federal Emergency Management Agency would suffer, and the nation’s ability to respond to a natural disaster or terrorist attack would be crippled.

That warning came from former FEMA head Michael Brown.

In a Sept. 15, 2003, memo, he wrote that the reorganization being proposed would “fundamentally sever FEMA from its core functions,” “shatter agency morale,” and “break longstanding, effective and tested relationships with states and first responder stakeholders.”

And it did.

It wasn’t the first time Brown had warned against reorganizing FEMA, either.

Brown, who now says he had planned to resign all along after Labor Day this year, did indeed quit after FEMA failed to respond adequately to Hurricane Katrina.

TheWashington Post has been running a series of articles on the history and making of the Department of Homeland Security, and in Friday’s article, the Post looks at how DHS stripped FEMA of its power and responsiblities, mainly because nobody liked Michael Brown.

“The slogan was ‘Do No Harm,’ but we were doing harm,” Brown said. “People became distracted from the mission, because we spent so much time and energy fighting for resources and working on reorganization. It just disintegrated our capacity.”

Initially, Brown’s bosses at DHS and the department’s architects in the White House shared the same goal of a beefed-up FEMA; their catchphrase was “FEMA on steroids.” But that is no longer the vision or the reality. And FEMA’s deterioration is not only the most visible failure of DHS: It is also emblematic of the turf battles that have plagued the rest of the department.

This account — drawing on internal documents and e-mails as well as interviews with Brown, FEMA officials and many of the DHS leaders who clashed with him, including Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff and his predecessor, Tom Ridge — reveals a more complex Brown than the now-familiar caricature of cronyism and incompetence. Long before his e-mails portrayed a befuddled bureaucrat who fretted about restaurant reservations and his Nordstrom wardrobe while New Orleans drowned, he was known at DHS as a fierce turf warrior whose griping about FEMA’s role alienated superiors and marginalized his agency.

Go read the whole thing; it’s extensive and enlightening. And if you’re a government bureaucrat, beware; that bureaucracy will come back and bite you one day, just like it bit all of us last September. Here’s another choice cut:

Katrina also triggered the biggest deployment in the National Disaster Medical System’s history. Thompson called the result “a national embarrassment.” In an after-action report, NDMS team leader Timothy Crowley, a doctor on the Harvard Medical School faculty, called the deployment a “TOTAL FAILURE.”

Crowley’s team was summoned late, then sent to Texas instead of Louisiana, then parked in Baton Rouge for a week while New Orleans suffered. When the team was finally sent to the disaster zone, it was immediately overwhelmed, but NDMS leaders told Lowell there was no help available, even though he later found out that a host of other teams “had been sitting on their butts for days waiting and asking for missions.”

“The current management team and disaster response is completely dysfunctional,” Crowley wrote. “I never learned what sort of political agenda or just plain incompetence or stupidity were behind these decisions.” His report was harsh, but not atypical.

“I was holding back!” he said.

I won’t ruin the ending for you, though. Go read the whole thing.