It is not yet hurricane season, but there are other sorts of natural disasters that aren’t so predictable. And there is not a director of FEMA. Some directors have a great deal of experience in disaster management, and some (GW’s guy who couldn’t manage to run the Arabian Horse Association) are sweet jobs given to friends or political supporters. After FEMA’s performance during Katrina, I expected the office to become the exclusive domain of people with disaster management experience. Folks from the Red Cross, or National Guards, or disaster response agencies from states prone to disasters. For some time, that expectation was realized.

Then came Trump. Like many facets of government where Republicans think government is just wasting money or causing problems … well, he hasn’t even managed to nominate a political hack to serve as the agency head. There’s no one. I have a lot of experience in M&A – any time your department doesn’t get a manager in the new org, update your resume. Your functionality is not going to be around much longer. Because, like we don’t actually ‘need’ the DOE (an agency that keeps track of nuclear materials and intercepts it on the black market) … evidently we don’t need FEMA??