After Hurricane Katrina crashed into the Gulf Coast in 2005, Congress sprang into action.
Seventeen days after the storm made landfall, the Republican-led House created a bipartisan select committee to investigate the Bush administration’s response to the storm. In the Senate, the committee with oversight over the Federal Emergency Management Agency held 22 hearings in six months. Within eight months, both committees had released 500-plus-page investigations into the Bush administration’s handling of the crisis with dozens of recommendations for reform.
In the year since Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico, killing nearly 70 percent more people than Katrina, the GOP-led House has yet to create a select committee to oversee the Trump administration’s recovery efforts. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which oversees FEMA, has held just two hearings related to the storm. Neither the House nor the Senate have issued any major reports, and none appear to be in the works.
The lack of congressional oversight is especially striking since serious questions remain unanswered about a hurricane that killed an estimated 2,975 people, according to researchers at George Washington University. President Donald Trump falsely claimed last week that the death count was inflated as part of a partisan Democratic attack. But with only limited oversight from Congress, disaster experts contend, it is difficult to hold officials accountable for delayed responses last year, to help FEMA learn from its mistakes or to provide a documented accounting of what happened in order to refute claims like the one in Trump’s tweet.
“Puerto Rico is getting far less attention, in spite of it being one of the worst disasters in modern American history, than Katrina and far less attention than we got for Superstorm Sandy,” said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. “From the beginning, the handling of Maria’s consequences both from the White House and Congress has been abysmally inadequate.”
After being slow to demand further oversight from congressional leaders,Democrats are now sharply criticizing Republicans for failing to act, calling for an independent commission to investigate the storm and promising to open a new investigation if they win back the House in November. They say that Republicans are providing political cover for Trump, whose response to the Puerto Rican disaster was slower than his efforts to clean up damage from Hurricane Harvey in Texas just a month earlier.
Republicans reject the criticism that they have not fully investigated the storm. They point to hearings across different committees, congressional trips to Puerto Rico and thousands of documents reviewed by congressional staff. The House has also twice passed bills aimed at helping FEMA to better prepare for future disasters.
“[The committees] have conducted rigorous oversight of the U.S. government’s response following the storms including holding full committee and subcommittee hearings, a field hearing, and bipartisan briefings,” said AshLee Strong, press secretary for House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) “This work is not over as we continue to conduct oversight including Congressional requests of the Government Accountability Office and forthcoming review of the Inspector General’s audit.”
Nonetheless, a two-month POLITICO review of Congress’ actions after Katrina and Maria found that the House and Senate acted far more aggressively in the year after Katrina than in the past year after Maria.
Soon after Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, House GOP leaders called for an investigation and created a select committee to investigate the storm. Democrats, in fact, voted almost unanimously against the creation of the committee, arguing that Republicans, who would lead the committee, would use it to whitewash the Bush administration’s response to the storm. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told Democrats to boycott the committee altogether, but representatives from the Gulf states participated anyway, believing that the committee, despite its makeup, was the best chance to get information out of the administration.
Former Rep. Charlie Melancon of Louisiana, the ranking Democrat on the committee, recalled that he didn’t remember the committee accomplishing much. “In my mind, it was to make it look like Congress or GOP leadership was doing something,” he said.
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