Bradford E. Billet, OBE, CEM

Bradford E. Billet, OBE, CEM is a crisis leader, strategist, author, and former senior New York City official. His career comprises four decades of leadership at the intersection of government, emergency management, diplomacy, business, and public service — including 22 years in New York City government across three mayoral administrations — built around the question of how leaders make sound decisions when the margin for error has disappeared.

Mr. Billet served 17 years as the City's liaison in the New York City Mayor's Office for International Affairs, including as First Deputy Commissioner and Acting Commissioner. The office is the City's principal liaison to the United Nations Secretariat and its member states, the U.S. Department of State, the 193 permanent missions accredited to the United Nations, and the 115 consulates operating within the five boroughs.

The work ranged from the ceremonial to the genuinely difficult: protocol for visiting heads of state during the General Assembly; security and traffic coordination across dozens of simultaneous motorcades; the resolution of disputes between the diplomatic community and City agencies over parking, taxation, real property, and criminal jurisdiction. Diplomatic immunity is a doctrine with teeth, and much of the office's daily labor consisted of finding outcomes that satisfied both the Vienna Conventions and the people of New York.

That tension reached the Supreme Court of the United States in Permanent Mission of India v. City of New York, the litigation over whether the City could pursue unpaid property taxes on the portions of diplomatic properties used as residential housing for staff. The case tested the reach of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act against a city's ordinary revenue authority. Mr. Billet's office sat at the center of the underlying dispute, holding open the diplomatic channel while the legal question moved through the federal courts — a lesson in how a working relationship survives an adversarial proceeding.

Before international affairs came the largest municipal reorganization of his career. In 1994, Mr. Billet was appointed to New York City Emergency Medical Service. At the merger he was Associate Executive Director of NYC EMS, radio designation Car 2, the department's second-ranking official. As the chief architect of the 17 March 1996 merger, he delivered it from the EMS side, from inside the agency being absorbed, folding NYC EMS into the FDNY — approximately 3,250 EMS personnel transferred into a combined department of roughly 16,000, the transfer figure recorded in the 1997 New York Supreme Court decision In re Stanley Hill — with two distinct labor cultures, two dispatch systems, and two operational doctrines.

He also helped create the FDNY's Certified First Responder–Defibrillation program, which was instituted before the merger, with deployment completed through 1997. It trained firefighters to handle medical emergencies and put trained medical responders and defibrillation capacity on the fire engines that were already the most widely distributed emergency assets in the City. The reasoning was clinical: the nearest trained unit should begin care immediately, and EMS should take over without a break in the continuum of care, so the patient had the best possible outcome. The merger is treated in detail on the emergency management page.

The crash of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island in July 1996 killed all 230 people aboard and drew in the National Transportation Safety Board, the FBI, the Coast Guard, foreign governments, and the families of victims from more than a dozen countries. It exposed how much of a large-scale response depends on structures that must exist before the event, not after it.

The New York City Office of Emergency Management was established by Executive Order 30 on 19 March 1996, two days after the FDNY–EMS merger took effect, driven by the decision to move emergency preparedness out of the Police Department. The merger did not create OEM; the two were parallel components of a single 1996 restructuring of the City's emergency apparatus. Mr. Billet served as OEM Deputy Director from June 1996 to June 1997. That agency, now NYC Emergency Management, remains the model many American cities copied.

On September 11, 2001, citizens of more than 90 countries were killed in Lower Manhattan. As a frontline responder and senior official in the Mayor's Office for International Affairs, Mr. Billet helped coordinate the evacuation of thousands of people, the City's official missing-persons operation, the Family Assistance Center, and support for victims and families arriving from abroad. The account is on the September 11 page.

Mr. Billet was appointed Honorary Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in 2002 for coordinating New York City's international response after September 11 — the honorary form of the award, conferred on non-British nationals. Sixty-seven British subjects died in the attacks, and the coordination between the City and the British Government in the weeks that followed was the substance of the citation. He is also a Certified Emergency Manager (CEM), the professional credential of the International Association of Emergency Managers. See the OBE page for the correct style and usage.

Today, Mr. Billet is the founder and chairman of Stat Advisors LLC, where he advises senior executives, boards, governments, law firms, and organizations on crisis management, strategy, risk, public affairs, and complex decision-making. The work applies the same underlying discipline learned in government: making consequential decisions under pressure with incomplete information and multiple stakeholders.

He is the author of Chaos Reveals It: Leadership Lessons and Stories from the Front Lines of 9/11, Disasters, Diplomacy, Business, and Beyond. The book draws on firsthand experience from the moments when leadership matters most and introduces the STAT System™ — Strategic, Tactical, Adaptive, and Timely — a practical framework for making sound decisions under pressure.

Mr. Billet is the founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of the East Hampton Village Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization established in 2021 to support the Village of East Hampton, New York. The Foundation's work is anchored in public safety: it raises and directs philanthropic support for the Village's police, fire, EMS, and village council initiatives, alongside parks, public spaces, cultural life, and community programming.

The premise is that a village budget can maintain what exists but rarely funds what would improve it, and that private philanthropy directed through a transparent civic vehicle can close that gap without privatizing public space. Every project the Foundation funds remains public, accessible, and maintained by the community it serves.

He also serves on the Executive Board of the Queen Elizabeth II September 11th Garden in Hanover Square, Lower Manhattan, which memorializes the British subjects killed in the attacks. Both are described on the philanthropy page.