Wallace Stickney

Wallace Elmer Stickney (born November 24, 1934) is an American civil servant, most prominently as the Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) under President George H. W. Bush.

Stickney was born in Salem, New Hampshire. He graduated from New England College in 1959 (B.S.) and received master degrees from Northeastern University (B.S.) and Harvard University (M.A.).

Stickney served the town engineer for Salem. He served as commissioner of the Southern Rockingham Regional Planning Commission. He also worked on environmental and economic impacts at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency office in Boston, Massachusetts.

From 1983 to 1985 he served as special assistant for environmental affairs to then Governor of New Hampshire, John H. Sununu. In 1985, he served as a commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Transportation.

He was nominated to lead FEMA in 1990. At the time, a significant portion of FEMA's budget dealt with Cold War issues of nuclear survivability. Stickney was later quoted "The evil empire had crumbled, the Warsaw Pact nations were becoming independent, and it became clear that the most difficult situation we would have to handle wouldn't be a maximum lay-down but a partial one, in which only a part of the country was knocked out," says Stickney. "It was a time of transition on the world scene."