The vote was 95-4 on Tuesday for Brock Long. He previously ran Alabama’s Emergency Management Agency and served as that state’s on-scene incident commander during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
Long takes over the agency at the beginning of hurricane season. The agency has already managed 41 disaster declarations this year and the Trump administration has proposed cutting nearly $1 billion from the agency’s budget.
More than $500 million in proposed cuts would come from FEMA’s grant programs, including the grants for pre-disaster mitigation efforts.