A Job No Qualified Candidates Want

FEMA Calls, but Top Job Is Tough Sell

The question is do these people not want the job, or do they not want it while Bush and his gang are running the show? Or while Chertoff is the head of DHS? Or while FEMA is the target of political reorganization that would fold it into DHS and other agencies? Or while congress is busy cutting FEMA funding? Or while the entire DHS organization is so fouled up that it isn't doing a very good job on any task under its jurisdiction? Sound like a dream job, doesn't it? Or was that a nightmare job?

The calls went out across the nation, as Bush administration officials asked the country's most seasoned disaster response experts to consider the job of a lifetime: FEMA director. But again and again, the response over the past several months was the same: "No thanks."

Unconvinced that the administration is serious about fixing the Federal Emergency Management Agency or that there is enough time actually to get it done before President Bush's second term ends, seven of these candidates for director or another top FEMA job said in interviews that they had pulled themselves out of the running.

"You don't take the fire chief job after someone has burned down the city unless you are going to be able to do it in the right fashion," said Ellis M. Stanley, general manager of emergency planning in Los Angeles, who said he was one of those called.

Now, with the next hurricane season only two months away, the Bush administration has finally come up with a convenient but somewhat embarrassing solution. Mr. Bush, several former and current FEMA officials said, intends to nominate R. David Paulison, a former fire official who has been filling in for the past seven months, to take on the job permanently.

"To a lot of people that would be an insult," said Craig Fugate, the top emergency management official in Florida, who said he also had been interviewed but then withdrew his name. "They have been publicly out looking at how many different names and everyone turned it down and they come back and ask you?"

The list of emergency managers who have spurned requests to be considered for FEMA director or another top post represents a who's who in the small, close-knit field.

Besides Mr. Stanley and Mr. Fugate, they include Richard Andrews, the former homeland security adviser to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California; Ellen M. Gordon, former homeland security advisor in Iowa; Dale W. Shipley of Ohio and Eric Tolbert of North Carolina, two former top FEMA officials who also served as the top emergency managers in their home states; and Bruce P. Baughman, the president of the National Emergency Management Association, as well as the top disaster planning official in Alabama.