Maxine Waters represents California's 35th congressional district in the House of Representatives.
In the days im-*mediately following Hurricane Katrina, I flew down and met with New Orleans residents trapped in the Convention Center. I stood among 10,000 people with insufficient food, water or means of escape. It was one of the most unnerving and upsetting experiences of my life to see my government’s pitiful response to the tragedy created by Hurricane Katrina.
One year later, the federal government’s failure to respond to survivors crying out for assistance continues. Just as our government left hundreds of thousands of Americans with no way out of the Gulf Coast, it is now leaving them with no way back to their homes and communities.
While all levels of government are accountable to their constituencies, huge natural disasters require the federal government to take the lead and muster national power to protect the millions of Americans whose lives are at stake. But through every stage of the Katrina disaster, the federal government failed the American people.
The federal government’s failure began with the failure to prepare. Funding for levee construction was cut along with protection for wetlands that provide a natural defense. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, created to help state and local governments cope with disasters that exceed local capability, was gutted. Bush appointed Michael Brown, the former commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association with no disaster management experience, as the agency’s director.
Second, the federal government failed to respond. While women and children baked and starved in the Superdome, buses sat unused. While elderly patients died in nursing homes, brave firefighters who had responded from every corner of the nation to help with rescue were held in Atlanta for training in community relations.
And now we are failing to rebuild. President Bush said “we will do what it takes.” But his Housing secretary says that “only the best residents should return” and he predicts that the “New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever.” We don’t need both ears to hear what the administration thinks of those black former residents—at least the ones who survived the callous disregard after the storm.
Congress has authorized in excess of $100 billion for reconstruction, most of which has been caught up in red tape in Washington. Meanwhile, 100,000 households still live in FEMA trailers and 10,000 FEMA trailers sit unused in Hope, Arkansas.
The House Financial Services subcommittee on housing and community opportunity, for which I am the ranking member, enhanced the Community Development Block Grant and Housing and Urban Development Section 8 housing vouchers for rental assistance. But the results have not made it to the affected families and individuals because the president and the federal government have failed to ensure that assistance arrives to the people. I have pushed for the rights of the survivors at every turn, voting to defend the minimum wage for workers reconstructing the Gulf, extending emergency hotel vouchers, and repairing voting machines so residents of the region could exercise their right to vote in their elections. But at every turn, Democrats have been countered by the Republican leadership and president, who have pushed through policies leading to the failure to prepare, respond, and rebuild.
What lies behind this string of failures? While incompetence and corruption run rampant in this administration and the Republican Congress, the problem reaches deeper than that. A new report by the Campaign for America's Future documents the federal government’s failures and traces their roots to the conservative ideology that has a stranglehold on our federal government. Our country is now run by people who don’t believe in government and do it badly. They shrink essential services, outsource core functions and care more about politics than performance.
Grover Norquist has described the conservative agenda without mincing words: "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." By shrinking government’s role in preparing and responding to emergencies, hundreds of Americans were left to drown as well. The death toll is now at 1,695 people, an enormous loss of life made more tragic by the fact that this loss could have been averted by responsible government preparation and response.
One year later, the failures of our government to respond to the needs of the Americans of the Gulf Coast region are mounting. Ironically, conservatives use these failures to prove that they’re right–that government can’t be done well, and that the entire project of governance is doomed to failure.
Americans know better. If the conservatives don’t want to govern, we can show them the door.
