Washington, D.C., overflows with organized interests and issue networks competing for the attention of lawmakers. A very few people manage to navigate the flotsam and jetsam of the policy currents to redefine an issue or put a new problem on the political agenda. Like their cousins in the private market, political scientists call these navigators “entrepreneurs.”

Policy entrepreneurs may be elected or appointed officials, career civil servants and, in a few cases, crusading journalists. They may bring a new issue to the fore, make connections between interest groups, professions, and lawmakers, or redefine an old paradigm in a crisis. Bureaucratic entrepreneurs link agencies to policymakers and to social groups; they are the type of men and women who win the Harvard University Innovations in Government awards. Though the essence of bureaucracy is regularity, innovators dot the landscape, as the awards regularly show.

You have not met a bureaucratic entrepreneur, however, until you have met the “Master of Disaster,” James Lee Witt. Before Witt took over as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the agency had a poor reputation among the public and among members of Congress. It was called a “federal turkey farm” on the House floor, and members of Congress publicly threatened its abolishment. In just a few years, however, FEMA became one of the most popular agencies in government.

My larger research project looks at the foundations of bureaucratic autonomy in post-WWII homeland security agencies. In constructing a bureaucratic pre-history to 9/11, I find that administrative autonomy stems from both reputation and the nature of an agency. I am interested in Witt's leadership at FEMA not so much for the conditions that gave rise to an entrepreneur but for the strategies Witt used to turn the agency around—strategies which other entrepreneurs might also be able to employ.

When Witt took over the agency in 1993, he personally met with members of Congress and told them to wait at least a year to move forward with proposals to abolish the agency, so that he might have a chance to lead a turnaround. His lobbying worked and laid the foundation for a strong relationship between FEMA and Congress during his eight-year tenure. Before FEMA's turnaround, the agency was a liability for elected officials, or at least the object of blame. After the agency began to respond to disasters more quickly and effectively, it became a useful tool for politicians. Disaster relief was the most visible and palpable connection many citizens had with the federal government.

The turnaround was not all public relations, however. Witt engineered a reorganization in 1993 that deemphasized the agency's national security role and put natural disasters front and center. The agency put the “all hazards” mission at its core, which meant that instead of having separate procedures for different kinds of disasters, it would use many of the same procedures, equipment, and personnel to prepare for all kinds of hazards—natural, technological, and human-caused. The basic structure would be divided according to divisions for preparation, response, and recovery, not according to types of disasters. The all hazards approach was more efficient than the old way and, more importantly, it gave emergency managers at the state, local, and federal levels a common point of reference. In installing the all hazards approach, Witt exemplified one of the key features of an entrepreneur: the ability to act as a conduit between groups. Witt connected the emergency management profession, a group of practitioners and academics at all levels of government and in the private sector, to lawmakers and decision-makers in the agency.¹

Before becoming FEMA director, Witt was an emergency manager in Yell Country, Arkansas, and he relied on the emergency management profession for suggestions about how to improve the agency. Aside from streamlining FEMA's mission, Witt made sure that civil servants had customer service training and he improved connections to the president, Congress, governors, and the profession. Witt was able to institutionalize many of his changes, and despite pressure for FEMA to take on a greater counterterrorism role now that it is part of the Department of Homeland Security, the agency has maintained a focus on all hazards and was widely praised for its effective response to the rash of hurricanes in Florida in 2004.

Witt's accomplishments speak for themselves but his personality speaks volumes as well. When I interviewed him, he sat behind his hardwood desk in a Witt and Associates monogrammed shirt with his boots propped up on the desk. He motioned for me, with pride, to sit in his stiff-backed leather cabinet chair which all cabinet members receive after they leave the administration. (He was the only FEMA director to be given a seat on the cabinet.) Witt's avuncular Arkansas manner belies the keen political savvy that made him one of the most successful appointees in the Clinton administration. His entrepreneurial spirit is still evident; he is now a sought after advisor on disasters and homeland security and has built a consulting firm that features, among other luminaries, retired General Wesley Clark.

Political scientists debate whether bureaucratic entrepreneurs are singular and occur by chance (Wilson 1989) or whether particular conditions give rise to entrepreneurs (Mintrom 2000; Teske and Schneider 1994). Communities that minimize the free-rider problem in political organization encourage entrepreneurship, according to these theories, as do business groups in which there is a small number of actors and the likelihood of future rewards or select incentives for those who advocate a particular cause (Mintrom 1997; Olson 1965).

There is no doubt that Witt is a singular individual, but he was also the right man at the right time. FEMA needed someone to connect the emergency management profession, the agency, and elected politicians. The question remains: If Witt had not existed, would we have been able to invent him?