Bush reorganizes FEMA into DHS, stripping its Cabinet-level status and direct White House access

President Bush folded FEMA into the newly created Department of Homeland Security on March 1, 2003, demoting the agency from a Cabinet-level entity to a sub-agency under a 22-department bureaucracy. FEMA director James Lee Witt, who had rebuilt the agency under Clinton, warned that embedding it in a security-focused department would cripple its disaster-response mission. The reorganization eliminated the FEMA director's direct line to the president and placed emergency management behind a new layer of DHS leadership.