Testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Friday, former Federal Emergency Management Agency head Michael Brown said that he warned the White House on Monday, Aug. 29, that New Orleans was flooding, but that bureaucratic obstacles got in the way.

Brown also cited the bureaucratic reorganization, in which FEMA was degraded from a Cabinet-level agency to a part of the Department of Homeland Security, as a factor in the government’s failures in responding to Hurricane Katrina.

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Unfortunately, I don’t have much time to comment or analyze on this, but I will note that Brown said he called the White House on Monday and told them that New Orleans was flooding; the White House said they weren’t notified until Tuesday. Of course, this turns out to be the White House’s fault.

When Brown called the White House, “For the first time,” he said, White House chief of staff Andrew Card told him, “Mike, you’re going to have to feed that up the chain of command.”

In other words, we don’t want to hear it because you didn’t follow the ridiculous bureaucracy, and because you didn’t, we didn’t officially hear it. The White House does indeed bear some blame here, as does Congress, for reorganizing FEMA this way in the first place.