Bureacracy Is Blocking Gulf Coast Recovery (Sen. Mary Landrieu)

I had a hearing today on the failed approach of the project work order sheets that we’re using to rebuild the Gulf Coast, and if we used the same process to rebuild Europe after WWII, we’d still be rebuilding on the Champs d’Elysees.

We’ve just got to cut through and recognize that the Stafford Act, as was quoted this morning by someone who testified, might work for garden-variety disasters, but it is too restrictive, too bureaucratic and too cumbersome to work for the kind of mega-catastrophe that we’re dealing with. So my committee is staying focused on improving the federal response and getting more accurate coordination between local, state and federal response for disaster, and we’ve got a long way to go.