According to Kettl, “Politics and performance become intertwined in charting what agencies do, how they do it, and how they might work better” (2015, p.137). In the United States, public administrative agencies have been guided by and operated around three core values known as neutral competence, executive leadership, and representativeness. Each agency however is often organized by different strategies, therefore, when attempting to work together to achieve a basic goal, interagency conflict arises, and basic objectives become quite complex to achieve. Effective responses among local, state, and federal agencies are extremely crucial in order to successfully combat disaster relief when a crisis occurs. Executive leadership, one of the core values discussed above, as described by Kettl is, “…for a strong elected executive —president, governor, mayor—and strong and loyal department heads, all political chosen. It also calls for a strong hierarchy that ensures the responsiveness of organizational units to the elected executives policy priorities” (2015, p. 137). Executive leadership is critical when a disaster occurs, as was seen when Hurricane Katrina hit. The response effort for Hurricane Katrina was quite a…show more content… 137). This element lacked in the case of Hurricane Katrina before Thad Allen had replaced the president of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. According to Kettl, “The Bush administration’s initial response to Katrina was anything but successful, with citizens stuck at the Superdome and political support crumbling” (2015, p. 130). The arrangements made by the legislature in the initial response to this disaster were of minimal help to the citizens during a time where an efficient response was needed the
