Pressure’s on for Obama’s FEMA director

For Craig Fugate, Hurricane Matthew feels like déjà vu.

The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency since the early days of the Obama administration, Fugate has more experience responding to hurricanes hitting Florida than perhaps anyone else. As Florida’s head of emergency management under then-Gov. Jeb Bush (R), Fugate led responses to seven major storms.

{mosads}And after a disastrously delayed response to Hurricane Katrina delivered a near fatal blow to President George W. Bush’s approval ratings in 2005, the Obama White House has relied on Fugate to act as the administration’s first responder — and to revitalize a deeply troubled agency in the process.

“The president wanted to make sure he got a good emergency manager. He got me,” Fugate said in a brief interview Friday. “It was him establishing that [disaster response] was going to be a priority.” 

The Obama administration has been keenly aware of the political risks of natural disasters. While a fast and efficient response doesn’t always guarantee credit, a slow and inefficient one can doom a political leader. Beyond Bush, modern political history is replete with mayors and governors who were slow to respond to snow storms or hurricanes or floods, then suffered at the polls. 

“It can end a person’s career,” Nancy Ward, who served as interim FEMA administrator until Fugate was confirmed, said of weak disaster responses.

Emergency managers across the country say FEMA, under Fugate, has crafted a new mission, one that prioritizes a proactive approach to disasters rather than a reactive one. That has changed the culture at an agency where employee morale tanked after Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent political fallout and altered the relationship between federal emergency managers and their state counterparts.

“After Katrina, there was kind of a back to basics emphasis and focus at FEMA to ensure that something like that never happened again,” said Ward, who now serves as deputy director of the California Office of Emergency Services. “Back in those times, we basically waited for sequential failure at the federal level to engage.”

FEMA was unusually unprepared to respond when Katrina hit, Ward said, because the agency had a backlog of hundreds of vacancies. It was also a much smaller agency than it is today.

“Katrina was a real hit to morale,” Ward said.

When he took office, Obama told Fugate he wanted a new approach, one that prioritized action over precision. In Fugate’s first week on the job, Obama visited FEMA’s headquarters. As tornados, floods, hurricanes and other disasters have unfolded over the years, Obama has routinely held Cabinet meetings in FEMA’s emergency operations center, in Southwest Washington.

“Our marching order from the president is, go like everything is bad, and we can correct it later,” Fugate said. “We may make mistakes, but we’d rather be on time than late.”

That approach has won FEMA credit from some officials who are otherwise among the Obama administration’s biggest critics. When devastating floods hit parts of Louisiana in August, Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, a frequent Obama critic who led the state’s disaster response, heaped praise on Fugate’s agency.

“FEMA has been on the ground, has been flying with us every day,” Nungesser told NPR. “I can’t tell you — there’s been a whole huge change since Katrina in the response, in wanting to get people on the ground. They’re on the ground already, meeting with people at the shelters, getting the information. And as you know, after Katrina, it took a long time. So they’ve gotten a lot better.”

Public perception of the federal government’s disaster response has undergone a sea change as well. In 2005, just 33 percent of Americans told Gallup pollsters they were satisfied with the government’s ability to respond to a natural disaster. In 2013, the last time Gallup asked the question, 75 percent of Americans said they were satisfied. 

State emergency management agencies still maintain primary authority over disaster response, and Fugate is quick to tell governors they get the final say. 

“We’re in support of governors. We’re not in charge,” Fugate said. “But we shouldn’t be waiting until something’s so bad that we’re showing up the day after something happens when we could have been there the day before.”

This week, FEMA didn’t have to send out new orders sending teams of responders to Florida ahead of Hurricane Matthew. The agency’s early responders have been in Florida for close to a month after deploying to battle Hurricane Hermine, which made landfall in Florida as a Category 1 storm on Sept. 2. 

“We can’t be bureaucrats in a crisis,” Fugate said.