On April 15, Michael D. Brown, under secretary for Emergency Preparedness and Response and director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, announced details of President George W. Bush’s new National Response Plan to federal, state, and local officials.

 Brown’s remarks to the Washington, D.C. National Response Plan workshop kicked off the first of seven NRP workshops to be held nationwide.

 “The goal of the National Response Plan and those working to support it is to make America safer, stronger, and more prepared; and there has never been a more important time for these objectives than now,” Brown said. “The guiding principles of the National Response Plan are that we are more effective when we are unified and we are smarter when we are coordinated.”
 
National Response Plan workshops promote understanding of the NRP among emergency managers and officials. Six similar NRP workshops will be held over the next two months in Seattle, Houston, New York, Miami, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

President George Bush directed the development of the National Response Plan in Homeland Security Presidential Directive Number 5, in Feb. 2003. The National Response Plan forms the basis for how the federal government will coordinate with state, local, and tribal governments and the private sector during the response to a national incident.

The Plan takes the best practices from a range of incident management disciplines including homeland security, emergency management, law enforcement, firefighting, public works, public health, and the private sector and integrates them into one unified structure.