[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 15]
[House]
[Pages 19786-19787]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




    ADVOCATING FOR SUPPORTING THE VICTIMS OF HURRICANE KATRINA IN A 
                        FISCALLY RESPONSIBLE WAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I feel compelled to come to the 
Floor here and make some remarks with regard to Hurricane Katrina, what 
we have done here from Congress, and what we need to do in the future.
  First, I want to say that as I look across the broad expanse of that 
disaster, the 90,000 square miles, roughly the size of Kansas, and I 
listen to the description that was delivered by Secretary of Homeland 
Security Michael Chertoff, that if you were going to do a military 
assault on a city, that storm did what a military assault would do. It 
went in on the wind and blew out the electricity and the 
communications, took the communications systems out, the power grid 
out, and then it cut off the transportation avenues in and out of the 
cities by taking out the bridges.
  Then, once it had isolated the city, then it attacked, and that was 
the flood that went in and did such devastating damage, damage that we 
have not quantified to date and will not quantify for at least some 
months to come, if not years to come.
  The work that was done down there, I know that the National Guard as 
early as a week ago Wednesday took chain saws and sawed their way into 
some of the communities. We have 70,000 military on the ground down 
there providing all of the assistance that they can. There were 
volunteers that came from everywhere, as the chairman of the Committee 
on Armed Services has said, so it is a huge human effort on the part of 
our people in this country. The donations have been flowing in. We have 
all reached out.
  Now, having said that, Madam Speaker, I want to also qualify this 
statement by informing this body, Madam Speaker, that I am a flood 
victim. I lived through the floods of 1993 in Iowa, and I had a 
business at that time. Actually, it did survive the flood, barely, with 
four major contracts going on simultaneously that had been under water 
intermittently throughout all the spring; and by July 9, they were all 
under water simultaneously, and I was looking at whether I was going to 
be able to survive as a business or not.
  I have gone through this pain. I walked away from my own business and 
let it sit and went and helped other people on the other side of the 
State. I am not a person without compassion. I am also not a person 
without fiscal responsibility.
  So when we were requested to support a unanimous consent agreement 
last week that appropriated $10.5 billion, I asked some questions on 
that, and some of the answers that I got were, well, it was $500 
million a day, now it is $750 million a day, so we need to get FEMA 
through until next week, and then we can take up this issue in a 
rational fashion.
  Well, we took up this issue in a fashion today, but I do not think it 
can be defined as a ``rational'' fashion. The $750 million a day became 
$2 billion a day, and when I asked the director of the Office of 
Management and Budget for an itemization of how they calculated this, 
we got asked to vote for $51.8 billion, with only about three line 
items in it: $1.4 billion, and I have it here, for the military; there 
is a $15 million set-aside, thankfully, for an inspector general to 
help audit some of this, but basically, we are looking at $50 billion 
in one line item that says, Trust us, we know what we are doing.
  Well, after I asked for the line items in this, I got a sheet at 5:34 
this morning, no time to drill down through this data. One of the 
things that we questioned OMB about yesterday was their announcement to 
us that there were 200,000 trailer homes purchased as part of that 
first $10.5 billion, for a cost of $3.3 billion, $16,000 a unit, 
roughly. There are only 30,000 temporary home trailers available for 
purchase in the United States; the balance of those 200,000 would need 
to be constructed. Apparently, the Federal Government has signed a 
contract for the delivery of the 30,000 and the construction of 170,000 
units for the price of $3.3 billion.

[[Page 19787]]

That is one of the ways that they are spending $2 billion a day, is to 
create trailer homes in a region where they may or may not be useful in 
the long term, approximately 100 miles north of New Orleans on the high 
ground, the dry ground, as I am told.
  That is imprudent early spending of money; it is not disaster 
spending of money.
  In addition, this appropriation that passed this House today has in 
it also a provision for $1.6 billion to go for another 100,000 trailer 
homes, none of which are built, and probably they are not contracted at 
this point. We do not have the oversight ability to be going in and 
spending $51.8 billion and doing so in an unchecked fashion.
  I asked to slow down this appropriation process, do it a week at a 
time so we could evaluate where we are going. That is why I voted 
``no.''
  I am going to be part of this reconstruction effort, I am going to be 
part of standing with the victims of this flood, but in a fiscally 
responsible fashion.

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