Sensible, that shirt. So sensible. Nerdy, yes. But Craig Fugate's button-down does its job in about five separate ways. The billowing apron of big-and-tall sailcloth, large and simple choices. A wide man, one of many in a wide office connected to a Holiday Inn just blocks from the White House. But the shirt also bears the guy's what-for stitched directly on one breast: W. CRAIG FUGATE, FEMA ADMINISTRATOR. And there's a modest version of the FEMA logo stitched on the other. It might as well be Lowe's or Sam's Club — he'd kill that job, too, study the problem of it and reinvent the place modestly and swiftly. Especially when things got busy, really busy, as they did this year at FEMA, with a record eighty-seven disaster declarations — tsunamis, mudslides, murderous tornadoes, coastal hurricanes, wandering tropical storms — through the start of fall. A record. (The previous high? Eighty-one, in 2010.) Fugate would lean into the problem of being busy, of being in demand, so far as he can, which is to say pretty damned far — further than anyone thought post-Katrina FEMA could, that's for sure — while staying tracked on the task, remaining immune to the whining defunding threats by the gesticulating dummies on the C-SPAN feed, and running the best and most responsive big-box department store in the rotting strip mall that is our federal government. That guy, the one with his name on his shirt, he could do it, show which way was up, tell people to use the leg up they already have, to look out for the people around them. In 2011, the busiest year ever for emergency management, Craig Fugate has proven that maybe we can save ourselves.

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The offices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency are, at different times and in various modes of response, peopled by labeled blazers and vests for the purpose of identifying the personnel from across a room: Coast Guard liaisons, utilities coordinators, construction-mitigation officers. Personnel must be known by the serv...