President George W. Bush, notorious for keeping his loyal favorites in crucial Cabinet positions even after they have presided over chaotic mismanagement or disastrously unsuccessful policies, appears to have retained his confidence so far in Chertoff. Unlike Porter Goss, a wash-out as director of the CIA, Chertoff has not made the mistake of feuding with more influential or powerful figures in the administration like Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

But although Bush continues to trust him, Congress no longer does, even though it is still run by the president's Republican Party. Last week, Congress voted to strip Chertoff of direct oversight of the troubled Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Not only did FEMA perform disastrously in failing to respond adequately to the flooding of New Orleans and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, it also allowed scores of billions of dollars worth of bloated reconstruction contracts to be approved without adequate scrutiny and it paid out more than $1 billion in fraudulent insurance claims.

Last week the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee of the U.S. Senate served notice that it had had enough. It approved legislation to shake up FEMA from top to bottom and give it exclusive status within the DHS.

If the legislation goes through Congress substantially unchanged, it will be an enormous loss of power and public humiliation for Chertoff.

The new legislation, listed as S. 3595, responds to the "serious failures in leadership and urgent need for broad reform" of FEMA, Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, said Thursday.

Collins said the sweeping legislation, which was approved on a voice vote, was a direct response to the weaknesses found in FEMA as a result of the Katrina disaster, CongressDaily said.

Collins described the new legislation as "a careful and comprehensive program for improvement of our emergency management system. It is a concrete, nuts and bolts plan designed to rebuild and strengthen a broken system."

A key provision in the proposed legislation would restore the FEMA director's access to the president and the White House that he enjoyed until the agency was incorporated into the gigantic new DHS bureaucracy set up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The bill gives FEMA's boss a "direct advisory role" with the president on emergency management issues. However, the new system may prove to be almost as cumbersome as the old one as FEMA's head will still routinely have to report through Chertoff.

The legislation also restores FEMA's distinct identity within the DHS and gives it a status comparable with that enjoyed by the U.S. Coast Guard, one of the most poorly funded, but also most lean and efficient, parts of the U.S. government or armed services.

Sensitive to the ridicule heaped on former FEMA head Michael Brown after New Orleans and Katrina, the new bill would legislate that future heads of the agency, unlike Brown, must have had serious experience in disaster response. It will require a minimum of five years of executive leadership and strong experience in crisis management. Brown had none. He had previously worked for the International Arabian Horse Association.

Senators on the Homeland Security committee gave Chertoff another slap last week that was less noted but in some respects more surprising. They rejected his department's request to shift $42 million from within already approved funds to tide the Federal Protective Service over an embarrassing budget bottleneck.

The FPS does important work. It provides security for federal buildings through contract guards. But it is paid by other agencies for providing these services. And according to a report Friday carried by GovExec.com, these agencies haven't been paying up and the financial squeeze at Federal Protection has escalated.

Chertoff and DHS acted to request emergency funding for the FPS but only at the last minute, and Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., chairman of the Senate Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee, was not amused. In a July 20 letter to Chertoff, the senator said he was "deeply dismayed at the lack of responsibility shown by the department (of Homeland Security) in delaying until the last possible day the submission of this request to the subcommittee." Gregg expressed to Chertoff his suspicion that the DHS was trying push the extra funding through the Senate at the last moment in order to prevent senators having time to "weigh alternatives or engage in a wider discussion of possible solutions."

"The requested shift would have drawn money from areas including explosives detection and detention of illegal immigrants," GovExec.com reported.

However, the conclusion of Gregg's letter to Chertoff may indicate a growing willingness to allow FPS to explore the option of increasing the fees it charges to other government departments, GovExec.com noted.

Gregg made clear he was not going to let the Federal Protection Service hang out in the wind. He urged Chertoff to negotiate new payment schedule agreements with the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and the General Services Administration.

By itself, the row, and Gregg's letter, would amount only to a storm in a tea cup. But it comes just as the Senate, including key leading Republicans on the Homeland Security Committee, is moving to radically reform FEMA and give it far more autonomy within the DHS. That means Chertoff's poor management record is going to come under increasing scrutiny. And most of that scrutiny is unlikely to be friendly.

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