Today the president nominated Craig Fugate to be the head of FEMA. Fugate is the current Director of Florida's Emergency Management agency, where he has gained extensive experience dealing with, among other things, the challenge of hurricanes (bio is after the jump). Politically, one has to wonder if there is any connection between this appointment and the chummy relationship that seems to be developing between the president and Florida Governor Charlie Crist. On the other hand, it seems like picking a FEMA administrator from a Hurricane state with a big emergency management agency was a fait accompli that probably shrunk the candidate pool considerably. On the more important policy side, this pick should satisfy the concerns of many in the emergency management community who wanted to make sure that someone with extensive experience dealing with disasters on the ground be tapped for the position, as I learned reporting this article on federal emergency management policy for our last issue. While FEMA has improved since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, there is plenty of work left to do, especially on empowering local- and state-level administrators to deal with the kinds of problems they actually face. Questions for Mr. Fugate: Will he advocate for an moving FEMA outside of DHS, or at least debating the proposition? Will he return the agency's focus to natural disaster mitigation? Will he do a "heckuva job"? (Favored answers: Yes, yes, no).
-- Tim Fernholz
