who will be the next FEMA administrator?

As it is with all political appointments, the current FEMA Administrator will submit her resignation on January 21st and another new era of FEMA will begin.

Since Katrina, the FEMA Administrator, while being a political appointee, was not a “political selection” per se. Talented state and local persons were considered, one selected and appointed. Today the trend in the new administration is to select people who they know are “loyal” to the President Elect.

The problem I see is that I can’t think of an emergency manager, serving in a government position today who is overtly political. My observation is that they all try to stay “apolitical.”  It you go “political” in doing your job, then you have stories like I covered recently where a FEMA employee was fired for directing her staff to not serve one portion of the population who were overtly supporting one political party and candidate.

As I wrote previously, that destroys trust in our system of serving all disaster survivors.

I’ve always tracked when new FEMA administrators are appointed. In the Obama Administration Craig Fugate was not appointed until about 4-5 months after the new administration took power. FEMA Administrator while important to us emergency managers does not rank right up there with the key cabinet positions being announced in recent days.

We’ll just have to wait and see who is tapped and then confirmed by the United States Senate.