Following its 1992 reorganization, the once scandal-ridden and sclerotic Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) experienced a dramatic turnaround. The agency morphed from a caricature of the ills of bureaucracy into a model of effective federal administration. Politicians who previously blamed the agency for its slow and inefficient response to disasters came to depend on the agency to lend credibility to their own efforts. After the agency’s reorganization, politicians at all levels of government purposefully appeared beside FEMA workers. As recently as 2002, FEMA’s reputation was so strong that the designers of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) included FEMA in it to lend prestige to the nascent department. Unlike other agencies so included, FEMA was allowed to keep its name, confirming the cachet of its brand.

The authors examine patterns of appointee continuity during the presidential administrations of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush using data tracking Senate‐confirmed agency appointee tenure, turnover, and vacancies between 1989 and 2009. Surveying existing scholarship on the link between appointee continuity and organizational performance, they highlight opportunities to expand research in this field. Though efforts to “fix” the rules governing agency appointments may be as inevitable as the appointee process is in some basic respects unfixable, the authors conclude by advocating a far less ambitious goal: a measure of clarity.

Emergency managers who work on floods and other weather-related hazards constitute critical frontline responders to disasters. Yet, while these professionals operate in a realm rife with uncertainty related to forecasts and other unknowns, the influence of uncertainty on their decision-making is poorly understood. Consequently, a national-level survey of county emergency managers in the United States was administered to examine how they interpret forecast information, using hypothetical climate, flood, and weather scenarios to simulate their responses to uncertain information. The study revealed that even emergency managers with substantial experience take decision shortcuts and make biased choices, just as do members of the general population. Their choices vary depending on such features as the format in which probabilistic forecasts are presented and whether outcomes are represented as gains or losses. In sum, forecast producers who consider these decision processes when developing and communicating forecasts could help to improve flood preparation and potentially reduce disaster losses.

We present evidence that emergency managers exhibit some of the same decision biases, sensitivity to framing, and heuristics found in studies of the general public, even when making decisions in their area of expertise. Our national survey of county-level emergency managers finds that managers appear more risk averse when the outcomes of actions are framed as gains than when equivalent outcomes are framed as losses, a finding that is consistent with prospect theory. We also find evidence that the perceived actions of emergency managers in neighboring jurisdictions affect the choices a manager makes. In addition, our managers show evidence of attribution bias, outcome bias, and difficulties processing numerical information, particularly probabilities compared to frequencies. Each of these departures from perfect rationality points to potential shortfalls in public managers’ decision making. We suggest opportunities to improve decision making through reframing problems, providing training in structured decision-making processes, and employing different choice architectures to nudge behavior in a beneficial direction.