[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 15]
[Senate]
[Pages 19883-19884]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         POSTDISASTER RESPONSE

  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I rise to discuss, for a moment on the 
record, what I have been telling some Senators individually and in 
groups about the management of postdisaster activities in the Gulf 
Coast area. Let me begin by saying that I am not going to add to the 
various discussions being had about who should decide what persons, if 
any, made mistakes in terms of controlling this disaster, the scourge 
of this hurricane. Did somebody not do what they were supposed to do or 
did somebody do it too late? If so, who was it, when did the mistake 
occur, and why did the person act as they did? That is, who was at 
fault in responding to this natural disaster, if anyone. I am not 
talking about that. I hear the rancor and the partisanship in the 
discussion about who should do that.
  I am talking about the fact that we have now the most difficult 
situation that America on its homeland has ever had to manage. We have 
never had anything as difficult as this to manage--the confusion, 
disrepair, individual suffering, displacement, hardship, property 
destruction, pollution. All of those things affected literally hundreds 
of thousands of people in three-plus States. We are currently in the 
immediate aftermath of the force that brought all those things upon us 
as a nation.
  How many people have been displaced--sometimes called refugees, but 
they will not be referred to as such by me--how many men, women, and 
children? I understand that the numbers displaced due to a natural 
disaster before this did not exceed 30,000. It was something under 
30,000. For this one disaster, there were over 450,000 people 
displaced. Anybody who thinks that what we have in place to manage a 
crisis of this magnitude is fine doesn't understand the proportions of 
this event. We don't have in place the tools, the wherewithal, the 
ability to manage this problem--not from the time of its arrival and 
not now, as we work to gradually make the situation better for 
everybody, to a point in time that we can take a deep breath and say: 
We have done as much as we can for as many as we can, and as far as our 
country and its people and its businesses and its charities are 
concerned, we have completed the task of responding to this emergency.
  We don't have any way of doing that. Anybody who is sitting around 
here contemplating the work of its committee, be it a chairman of a 
committee or the chairman of a subcommittee, and thinking they know how 
to do that, let me tell you, they don't. I regret to say it. In all 
deference, I am one of those chairmen. I have a standing committee and 
a subcommittee. They are both involved in this event. One is Energy and 
Natural Resources. The other is Appropriations for Energy and Water, 
which is literally all the energy around there, pipelines and the like, 
and the Corps of Engineers. So I could be saying I will do my share. I 
will start having hearings. But I submit that this work that I would do 
and that any other committee of the Congress would do is as apt to be 
meaningless or wrong or moving in the wrong direction, when looked at a 
year from now, as it is to be appropriate.
  It isn't that we are doing anything wrong; it is that we don't know 
what our goal is. We don't know where we are going. We know people need 
checks. We know people need money. We know people need accelerated 
Social Security and Medicaid benefits. We also know people need 
housing. But does that mean we should hold a hearing in the housing 
Appropriations Committee and decide: Here is a new program. We are 
going to fund the program. It will be grants and loans, 100,000 new 
houses for these people? Of course it doesn't mean that at all.
  We need somebody to put the plan together and decide what the housing 
situation is going to be like for these people. Do we need interim 
help? Will that be vouchers? And who will start putting that together? 
I could go on. This is not because anybody has not done their job. 
Forget about that. Whatever the job that was to be done, right or 
wrong, is finished. What you have to do now is rehabilitate, replan, 
and put in place what must be done within the laws of America, with the 
dollars of our taxpayers.
  I came here in 1972, believe it or not. I was 39 years old. I don't 
know how I got here or why I was here. I got a great big assignment, 
one committee, Public Works. You new Senators who worry about your 
committee assignments these days, I only had one. I got a very 
auspicious job, too. I was ranking committee member on a subcommittee 
on disaster relief. I thought: Well, I will never have a hearing, but 
when I have been here long enough, I will go to another committee.
  But lo and behold, Agnes hit. Agnes was a giant hurricane that caused 
a Northeastern flood, all the way through Pennsylvania. Sure enough, I 
went to work. I learned about disasters.
  But what I also learned was that through the good wisdom of a 
Senator, who, as I now understand it, was Hugh Scott, the minority 
leader from Pennsylvania--he used to sit over here when we had very few 
seats on this side of the Aisle--he talked Richard Nixon into 
appointing a man to be in charge of the Agnes recovery named Frank 
Carlucci. You've all heard his name of late. However they found him, I 
don't know. They must have been clairvoyant; they must have known he 
was something super. He was President's Nixon's on the ground 
representative for Agnes for 3 or 4 years, and we came out of that. 
Today his job would be comparable to having all involved computers run 
out of one office by people in the executive branch of Government, as 
if the OMB moved over there to handle things. Everything ran according 
to plans that came out of Carlucci's office of recovery. Nixon did not 
use a Marshall plan. He put somebody in charge of telling us what 
resources we ought to use and what our options were.
  From that, he went on to other areas of success, so they must have 
picked the right guy. He held two Cabinet positions. He was a great 
success in business. That has nothing to do with what I am talking 
about, but he was apparently a very talented man. Now this President 
ought to pick a very talented leader, someone who is not in the 
Government, for a similar task. I mean no offense to the current 
establishment working in the Gulf Coast. They are there because we had 
an emergency--a disaster. But they are not there to handle what is 
going to be about a 10-year recovery program.
  I think the occupant of the Chair knows this. This recovery plan will 
go on long beyond the next 2 or 3 years. We better have our recovery 
efforts, and oversight of those efforts, occur in an orderly manner or 
can you imagine how many hearings we are going to have? Can you imagine 
how many committees are going to be involved in saying they are solving 
this problem? Can you imagine the number of press releases that will be 
issued by subcommittees that are holding hearings about fixing this 
thing? Can you imagine the laws they are going to bring down here to 
the floor to pass saying, we are solving Katrina? All those things 
ought to come out of somebody who is on the ground analyzing the 
situation.
  I urge the President to act. Give the position whatever name you 
like. I hate to use the word ``czar''. It doesn't sound right to say 
``commander.'' It doesn't sound right to say ``general.'' But they 
ought to put somebody in charge by executive order and give them the 
OMB type of office experts to help them analyze this situation and 
present to the Congress, through the President, the information we need 
for us to make the decisions about what policies we want.
  Far be it from me to know much about managing things because I don't

[[Page 19884]]

manage much except in my office, and I am not sure sometimes if a 
Senate office is even manageable. Whatever I have to manage, it 
probably has not been managed very well. Once I thought it was so 
important to manage that I hired somebody to see if they could write a 
manual on how you manage a Senate office. He was the greatest manager I 
had ever seen in New Mexico. He spent a year and a half working. He 
wrote a manual. When he was finished, he said: I guess I have tell you, 
you have to make this current about every week because things are so 
changeable here. So I don't know how to manage things.
  But what I know is that what we have now cries out for a manager or 
we are going to have disorder following disaster. We are going to have 
money following money and then people asking: What wasn't done that 
should have been done? The sooner a manager is put in place, the 
better. I hope the President will act.
  I thank the Senate for listening. I thank the Presiding Officer, 
because he is the only one who has to stay around here before we 
finish, and Senator Alexander for being a gentleman.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I am glad I had an opportunity to hear 
the Senator from New Mexico, who has a lot of wisdom on a lot of 
subjects. One of the most important things he reminded us of was to try 
to get in concrete terms the immensity of this disaster. We see it on 
television. We know there is more to be done than has been done. We 
know it is going to last a long time. I heard the same facts he did 
today, that the most displaced families that FEMA has ever had in one 
of its disasters was 22,000. This is 400,000 or 450,000 or 500,000. In 
other words, this is 20 times the scale of the worst disaster we have 
ever had in terms of displaced Americans. And so we are all scrambling. 
I think it is important for the Senator from New Mexico to have brought 
that up.
  He also heard, as I heard, that one of the last great hurricanes we 
had was Harvey, I believe. FEMA is just finishing the work on Harvey 
now 10 years later because it takes a long time to help communities and 
people get back on their feet. So this is a massive challenge. All of 
us want to help.
  There is one other thing I am prompted to say before I say a word or 
two about higher education and the bill that was reported today by the 
HELP Committee. I have talked a lot in the past about the idea of a 
citizen legislature. The Senator from New Mexico has as well. Senator 
Howard Baker, who used to be the majority leader, used to talk about 
the citizen legislature and how valuable it was for our country if 
those of us who serve here spend a lot of time in our home states, that 
we spend time at the diner instead of dinner with a lobbyist, that we 
spend time at the church instead of up here at a ball game, that we 
keep our feet on the ground, and that is very important.
  I believe that is probably more important today than it has ever been 
before. I will give an example. I was about to come back up here after 
our 5-week break. The morning paper reported that an airplane had 
arrived from Louisiana with 80 people on it who were in dire straits. 
Al Gore, the former Vice President of the United States from Tennessee, 
gave no interview to anybody, and had nothing to say. It has come out 
since then that he apparently arranged for the plane and may have paid 
for it. In other words, he brought them up from New Orleans.
  I did what other people, I guess, did in our country. Before I came 
back to Washington, I sent a contribution over to the American Red 
Cross in Blount County, my home county. These 80 people were brought to 
the Christian church on Highway 321, where the Red Cross began to try 
to help them in various ways.
  It never once occurred to me that I might be giving some advantage to 
a prominent Democrat by supporting something he was doing to help 
people. It never occurred to me. I doubt it ever occurred to Vice 
President Gore that he was bringing those 80 displaced persons to one 
of the most Republican counties in the United States. We have not had 
an elected Democrat in Congress from our area since the Civil War.
  So in Maryville, TN, and I am sure in the Commonwealth of Virginia 
and everywhere in this country, the people who sent us here know what 
to do. They are opening their hearts, they are opening their doors, 
they are opening their churches, and they are opening their 
pocketbooks. The furthest thing from their minds is political 
advantage. I suspect that is exactly how they would like for us to 
conduct ourselves here.
  It seems to me impossible in this body to avoid partisanship. 
Sometimes I think we have a playpen over here and a playpen over here, 
and a few Senators and House Members are always angling for partisan 
advantage. But this is no time for it. So when those impulses or 
outbursts occur, my suggestion would be that we go home.
  In my case, it will be Maryville, TN. Most of us go home on the 
weekend or we go home for periods of time. We go down to a shelter, we 
go down to a church, and we see how the people who sent us here are 
conducting themselves in dealing with this tragedy. And we remind 
ourselves of that, and we take a lesson from them. When we come back up 
here Monday through Friday, then hopefully we would conduct ourselves 
as well as they are conducting themselves. They would expect that from 
us, and we will do a lot better job of helping deal with this immense 
tragedy, 20 times as large as anything we have seen before.

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