A Plague on the Nation

While the administration has continued to pour funds into warding off future terrorist attacks, the White House’s budget proposal for the 2006 fiscal year called for a $71.2m (€39m, £57m) reduction in federal funding for hurricane and flood prevention projects in the New Orleans district, the largest such cut ever proposed.

Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democratic senator, has avoided any criticism of the administration since the hurricane struck, but in June she called the proposed cuts “extremely shortsighted”.

These projects are literally life-and-death projects to the people of south Louisiana,” she said at the time.

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Cuts to flood protection funds questioned
By Edward Alden, Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
Published: September 1 2005

As efforts continued on Thursday to rush aid to New Orleans, questions were being raised whether the administration of President George W. Bush had weakened efforts to prepare for a disaster that had long been predicted.

The administration and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives pushed this year for the largest ever cut to funding for hurricane protection and flood control in Louisiana, a stance that is likely to draw fresh criticism after the catastrophic flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina.

While the administration has continued to pour funds into warding off future terrorist attacks, the White House’s budget proposal for the 2006 fiscal year called for a $71.2m (€39m, £57m) reduction in federal funding for hurricane and flood prevention projects in the New Orleans district, the largest such cut ever proposed.

In addition, the administration wanted to shelve a study aimed at determining ways to protect New Orleans from a Category 5 hurricane, one notch above the storm that struck on Monday.

Later this year the House and Senate are expected to iron out differences in a budget bill that provides money for new flood and hurricane protection construction for southeast Louisiana. Following the White House budget request, the House voted to cut Army Corps of Engineers spending for the project from $33m in 2005 to $10.5m in 2006. The Senate version of the bill would restore funding to $37m. The two versions have not yet been reconciled.

This year the Senate also defeated a House provision in the energy bill that would have provided Louisiana with about $1bn a year in offshore oil revenues to help rebuild the coastline and protect it from hurricanes, according to Chris Paolino, spokesman for Bobby Jindal, a Louisiana congressman.

Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democratic senator, has avoided any criticism of the administration since the hurricane struck, but in June she called the proposed cuts “extremely shortsighted”.

“These projects are literally life-and-death projects to the people of south Louisiana,” she said at the time.

Overall, federal funding for hurricane-control pro-jects in the region has fallen by almost half since 2001, from $147m to just $82m in the current fiscal year, which ends on September 30.

Eric Holdeman, director of the King County office of emergency management in Washington state, the coastal region that lies on a major earthquake fault, said the federal government’s intense focus on terrorism-related preparedness since the September 11 attacks had left many communities dangerously unprepared in the event of hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), which is responsible for responding to natural disasters, has been subsumed since the September 11 attacks into the huge Department of Homeland Security, whose chief mandate is to prevent and mitigate terrorist attacks.

“The big thing for Fema is that they went from being a tier-one federal agency... [and now] they aren’t even in the backseat,” he said. “They are in the trunk of the Department of Homeland Security car.”

Walter Maestri, director of emergency management in Jefferson parish, near New Orleans, said in an interview last month with the New Orleans City Business that a large hurricane in New Orleans would rank as the third largest-possible natural disaster in the US – the first being a huge earthquake along the San Andreas fault on the west coast, and the second large-scale flooding in New York.

But Bush administration officials on Thursday strongly denied that the focus on terrorism had degraded Washington’s ability to respond to natural disasters. Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, said that since September 11 the US had been better prepared “to deal with all kinds of catastrophes”.