Assistant Administrator/Deputy Assistant Administrator

Mission

Serve as the Agency fire protection and emergency response community expert to the Director. Administer, coordinate, direct, and control fire prevention, mitigation and response activities, and fire service and allied professions training and education programs.

Functions

  1. Serve as an advocate at the Federal level of those challenges facing fire service managers through vigorous justification of USFA programs, goals, and objectives.
  2. Respond to emergencies where a Federal response is necessary to demonstrate that fire service personnel are America's first responders to all hazards.
  3. Establish policy and provide overall direction for USFA programs.
  4. Establish fire prevention, control, and training plans, programs, and systems to ensure effective joint action to support the public, industry, various levels of government, and the fire services nationally to reduce the rates of death, injury, and property loss caused by fire.
  5. Develop programs to increase the capacity of the fire service community to respond to, prevent, and mitigate the consequences of local emergencies; and to strengthen and support other emergency and disaster response elements.
  6. Maintain liaison with other Federal agencies and the fire protection community concerning the delivery of FEMA/USFA programs. Serves as a catalyst for prevention advocacy as it relates to "America at Risk" in regards to fire protection communities and their roles and responsibilities for risk management.
  7. Manage a National system for collecting and analyzing fire-incident information that addresses information needs of the fire community and other interested stakeholders.
  8. Encourage and participate in developing and promoting fire protection technology.
  9. Improve capacity of fire services in the areas of personnel resources, fire defense and emergency response planning, arson prevention and control, and fire prevention strategies.
  10. Participate in investigations and/or reviews of major fires to assist the USFA in disseminating information gained.
  11. Incorporate findings from research, and use feedback from students of the National Fire Academy and customers in programs developed by USFA.
  12. Establish fire education and training goals and objectives.
  13. Review and set priorities for fire education and training, ensuring feasibility and compatibility with essential agency and programmatic goals and objectives, and recognizing fiscal constraints. Balance priorities for meeting the training need defined against the potential organizational impact, availability of staff and faculty, and levels of administrative and logistical training support required.
  14. Develop fire education and training programs, policies, and objectives that articulate curriculum planning parameters; and develop a long-range curriculum plan that is consonant with multi-year planning and budget documents.
  15. Plan, develop, deliver, revise, and evaluate courses, seminars, conferences, workshops, exercises and other fire-training activities. In so doing, follow high academic standards and use innovative deployment and delivery techniques.
  16. Serve as the primary Federal interface with fire service communities for developing and providing education and training, materials, programs, research, information, technical assistance, educational methodologies, and training delivery strategies.
  17. Serve as FEMA's representative to the wildfire agencies at the Federal, State and local levels.
  18. Support the Agency's emergency response functions by providing staff to serve on emergency support and emergency response teams.
  19. Manage the Preparedness Network (PREPnet) television broadcast studio and related television and videotape production activities. This includes creating and revising videotapes for training activities with in-house resources.