Federal Government Policy and Business

FEMA chief no newcomer to government disaster response

Federal Times: Hurricane Katrina. Deepwater Horizon. And now, perhaps the worst disaster Texas has ever seen.

Brock Long, the man directing the Trump administration’s response to Hurricane Harvey, is a veteran of disaster management in government and the private sector. But the newly confirmed FEMA administrator is facing a new scale of problems to solve in the historic devastation of the nation’s fourth-largest city. And if the past is any indication, political storms could loom on the horizon.

“We have not seen an event like this. You could not draw this forecast up,” Long said Monday in Washington, amid a storm and flooding the National Weather Service called “unprecedented.” Trump himself placed the stakes on Long’s shoulders, tweeting that his FEMA administrator since June was doing “a great job” managing this critical test of the often troubled administration.

Read article