EDITORIAL - No new agency needed, just lessons learned

Senator Alan Peter Cayetano is seeking the creation of a new agency tasked solely with responding to disasters. It is easy to see where Cayetano is coming from. Given the way government fell flat on its face in promptly responding to the Yolanda catastrophe, it is tempting to give Cayetano precisely what he wants.

It may, however, not be wise nor practical to grant Cayetano his wish. There are already several other existing agencies some of whose important duties are precisely to do what Cayetano's envisioned new agency may be mandated to do.

If Cayetano's new agency gets born, it will definitely take away some of the jobs assigned to existing agencies. That will leave these agencies with almost nothing to do. And yet there is little anyone can do, Cayetano included, to make these truncated agencies function productively, their lighter load notwithstanding.

And there is also little or no way the existing agencies can be abolished. In short, we may end up with even more agencies than we can possibly handle, much less finance. On the other hand, there's no guarantee that a new agency will produce better results than the existing agencies combined.

The best thing to do under the circumstances is not to create a new agency, with its natural lack of guarantees, but to strengthen and modernize the existing ones and make accountability a rigid part of their philosophy.

The good senator was probably driven to action by the appalling images that he must have seen not just of the devastation but of the situation spinning out of control because of the very palpable lack or slowness of government response.

But there is always wisdom in not immediately jumping into the lake simply because of the need to cool down. Cayetano's proposal will only work if the other agencies, whose functions his new one seeks to replace, are found totally unworthy of keeping.

That doesn't seem to be the case, however. Many of these other agencies are still functioning and can function better if they have the willingness and the resolve to learn from the lessons of their great debacle. It will be far more prudent to keep what you already have and make them serve their true purpose.