Mr. President, for the last few minutes, I have listened with great interest to the Senator from Iowa reading a diary of the experience of a dedicated volunteer, obviously, to help out with Katrina…
Mr. President, for the last few minutes, I have listened with great interest to the Senator from Iowa reading a diary of the experience of a dedicated volunteer, obviously, to help out with Katrina victims in Louisiana and Mississippi. I found it most
fascinating and also most frustrating, as I think the Senator did and certainly the person involved.
I want to also say ``happy birthday'' to Barbara Grassley. I hope the Senator will communicate that to her. My wife Suzanne and I know Barbara and Chuck well, and I extend a ``happy birthday'' from the Craig family to Barbara.
While I was home in Idaho this past week, like many of us who were in our home States, I held a series of town meetings across the State. The most often asked question at those open town meeting forums was about deficit spending and the cost of Katrina and the overall concern Idahoans have about Katrina and Katrina victims.
As the Senator from Iowa spoke, it is so true of Idaho and other States across the Nation where tremendous voluntary efforts have poured out in behalf of the citizens of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas. They have gone through these literally catastrophic experiences of a magnitude that none of us certainly in Idaho have every experienced.
While that concern is real and the voluntary and contributive effort is of a record like none we have ever seen in our country, I truly believe there is a growing concern about the wise and responsible and careful use of the tax dollars. As Idahoans and Americans send their time and their generosity to the South, we are also sending our tax dollars. Clearly we want them spent carefully and wisely.
Prior to the recess, Congress held hearings to examine the fallacies of the response to Hurricane Katrina. There was much criticism--most of it, in part, from the press and some of it not as well-founded as we find out as expressed at the time--about what was done, what could be done, and what should be done appropriately to handle the literally billions of dollars headed south to help the citizens of those States.
In 5 or 10 years I hope we will not be conducting the same backward- looking hearings on how Federal dollars were spent, how waste, fraud, and abuse occurred in the Gulf States, and how it might have been prevented as we are looking backward today to see why the response to Katrina was so mishandled. Instead of looking back, we are now in a position to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse by acting responsibly now to control and offset Government spending. There are numerous ways for Congress to do this, but perhaps it is noteworthy to first talk about the congressional measures that will not, in my opinion, do it appropriately. Senate bill 1766, the Hurricane Katrina Disaster Relief and Economic Recovery Act, known as the Pelican Project, whatever you call the bill, $250 billion of what I have examined and referred to as a pork-stuffed package, costing more than the Louisiana Purchase adjusted for inflation, is not the way to go.
Some of the more noteworthy ``relief provisions'' in the bill include $8 million for an alligator farm, $25 million for sugarcane research and, of course, the $35 million to restore the seafood industry. At this time, it is questionable whether Federal tax dollars ought to be spent in those categories. However, overshadowing all of that, and what is worse, is the bill's whopping $40 billion requested not by but for the Army Corps of Engineers projects, many of which were unrelated to the flood projects or the flood protection.
To put this in perspective, the overall national Army Corps of Engineers budget for fiscal year 2005 was $4 billion, one-tenth of what was proposed for Louisiana. The Louisiana tradition of overreaching Corps projects makes this request, I guess, a little less surprising.
Take, for example, the Industrial Canal lock navigation project in New Orleans. In 2000, the Corps launched a $750 million lock navigation project on the Industrial Canal in New Orleans, the most expensive single lock project in history. The Corps justified its massive project by predicting barge traffic on the canal would increase when traffic, in fact, was decreasing, and had decreased 50 percent since 1988. Despite the economic and social concerns the project posed, Louisiana consistently welcomed it. The Industrial Canal has received more than $70 million over the last few years. In the 2006 budget, the President provided no funding for the Industrial Canal. However, the House--that is right--and this Senate pumped nearly $15 million into the project.
If we are wondering where the money came from, one of the programs the Senate cut in the same year was the one of the national priority projects. That is, the west bank and vicinity hurricane protection project of New Orleans. We cut that to do something else. Indeed, one of the levees that lined the Industrial Canal failed after Hurricane Katrina hit, inundating the lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans with floodwater. Yet that is where the money was cut to fund the canal itself.
Louisiana has never suffered from a lack of Army Corps funding. Over the last 5 years the State reportedly has received $1.9 billion in Corps funds, far more than any other State. If Hurricane Katrina stood for anything other than Mother Nature's catastrophic power, it is Louisiana, in my opinion, and the catastrophic failure to prioritize public interest projects over what now appears to be pork.
S. 1776 is no different. The bill's working group on Corps response projects was dominated by special interest lobbyists, with one insider reportedly expressing concern that the focus was not on protecting Louisiana. In addition, the bill would exempt any Corps projects from provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act and it would also waive the usual Corps cost-sharing requirements, thus making taxpayers foot the entire bill. At a time of catastrophic emergency, I would be willing to look at something such as that. At the same time, these are material dollars that are going. Clearly, they deserve our oversight.
The taxpayer has already paid, dutifully and dearly, for Katrina relief. Thus far, $62.3 billion in emergency supplemental funding has been authorized for immediate relief and response needs for victims of Katrina. However, the Federal Government's role in disaster relief, as provided by existing law, is only one of support to State and local governments and agencies. The Stafford Act, which provides the statutory framework for Presidential declaration of an emergency or major disaster, explicitly states that Federal resources should supplement, not replace, State and local resources for disaster relief.
We understand the magnitude and we understand, in the case of Mississippi and Louisiana, major wipeouts of a kind we have never seen before. But still, let's not change the laws and the relationships. Let's keep the balance in mind as this Congress decides, and I hope tracks and, most importantly, monitors where those dollars go and how they will be spent.
With an act of supplementary spending also comes the duty of offsetting. Before Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Budget Office projected the 2005 deficit would total $331 billion. The picture, of course, is only bleaker now. Numerous groups have offered comprehensive savings proposals that would offset the massive costs of Katrina relief.
The Republican Study Committee, the Congressional Budget Office, the General Accounting Office, Citizens Against Government Waste, the Cato Institute, American Enterprise, the Heritage Foundation, all have come up with a variety of proposals not to deficit spend all of it but to see some reasonable belt tightening at the Federal level and some--not all--of the disaster relief being able to come out of current budgets.
In addition to these savings proposals, the Senate majority leader recently proposed a rescission package that would rescind unnecessary spending. A few weeks ago, President Bush became directly involved when he called on Congress to enact his proposed cuts in both mandatory and discretionary spending. There is little we can change about Katrina. Yet the focus still seems to be on finding who is responsible for the response or the lack of response. We are always responsible for the health of our Government, for the wise use of hard-earned taxpayer dollars, and for ensuring that America's future generations do not foot the bill for all of the current fiscal recklessness. The spending will be the subject of both public and Government scrutiny for future years, but we can prevent any of the waste or the fraud or abuse of those moneys that will occur or could occur.
That job is now. That is our responsibility as a Congress. I urge my colleagues to work with the Senators from Louisiana and Mississippi. Clearly, the need is real, and no one in any way denies that. But there is a responsibility here, a fundamental responsibility, as we literally send billions upon billions of dollars south to rebuild and reshape and refurbish the economies of those States, that those dollars be spent wisely, that those dollars be spent cautiously, and that no one individual benefit in an extraordinary, abusive, or fraudulent way. That is the responsibility of this Congress that I take most sincerely and I know most of my colleagues do.
I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
