Why did it take so long? Why was government at almost all levels sluggish in providing aid to the victims of hurricane Katrina?

That's an issue that will preoccupy Washington for months to come. This week, President Bush appointed domestic security adviser Frances Townsend to lead an internal White House inquiry. And Congress will almost certainly authorize a full-scale investigation into the Katrina response, though its form and timing are still disputed.

Individual congressional panels have already begun to hold hearings, but testimony so far has dealt with preparation for future disasters, not the havoc wrought by Katrina's fury.

That said, some lines of questioning are already obvious. From unread plans to unmobilized troops, to a command structure that at times seemed less organized than a soccer team of 7-year-olds, the Katrina response was a case study in confusion. Official briefings, after-action reports, and media accounts have begun to sketch in some crucial details about why this might have been so.

Disaster plans were either incomplete, or ignored. Take the Louisiana State Emergency Operations Plan, drawn up in 2000. It has an extensive section on the evacuation of southeast Louisiana, and subsequent sheltering of evacuees, in the event of a hurricane. According to the plan, those not able to drive away from New Orleans were to be transported on locally obtained buses.

Yet New Orleans city officials had long known that those buses would not be forthcoming. From Mayor Ray Nagin (D) on down, they have said that they knew they didn't have the resources to empty out the city as the plan said. As Mr. Nagin told The Wall Street Journal, his own plan was "get people to higher ground and have the Feds and the state airlift supplies to them."

An unanswered question is why the city did not use the resources it did have, even if those might not have been enough to fully transport the estimated 20 percent of the city that didn't leave by car. New Orleans had upwards of 300 buses, plus hundreds of school buses and other municipal vehicles.

Similarly, the relevance of the Department of Homeland Security's National Response Plan (NRP) to the effort that evolved now seems in question.

Released in December 2004, the NRP is an attempt to reorient national disaster preparedness. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), formerly an independent agency, is now part of the larger Homeland Security bureaucracy. Its main stated mission is to support state and local responders.

Thus FEMA waited for state and local officials to provide it with detailed lists of needs. As former director Michael Brown told The New York Times last week, "I never received specific requests for specific things that needed doing."

State and local officials, for their part, were perhaps still thinking about the old, independent FEMA. They were quickly overwhelmed by the disaster, and felt they had neither the time nor information to provided request spreadsheets.

As Congress furthers its Katrina inquiries, it will surely weigh whether FEMA should be plucked out of the larger Department of Homeland Security and made separate once again.

"We would have expected a sharp, crisp response to this terrible tragedy," said Sen. Susan Collins (R) of Maine, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, at a kickoff hearing on Katrina last week. "Instead, we witnessed what appeared to be a sluggish initial response."

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