WASHINGTON—Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo said Friday that it’s time to stop “runaway government spending” on post-Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts. Louisiana’s governor called the statement “an insult to Americans in need.”
Tancredo, a Colorado congressman, said “enough is enough,” aiming to head off requests for more money to help New Orleans recover from the hurricane that ravaged the city and much of the Gulf Coast two years ago this week.
His statement comes two days after President Bush visited New Orleans and promised residents “better days are ahead” and “we haven’t forgotten, and won’t.”
Katrina smashed through levees in New Orleans and flooded 80 percent of the historic city on Aug. 29, 2005. It also obliterated coastal Mississippi and killed 1,600 people.
Several New Orleans neighborhoods still look like a wasteland, and Tancredo says the federal government is partly to blame. It has spent about $114 billion—or around $1 billion per week—but hasn’t paid enough attention to how the money has been used, he said.
Citing a Government Accountability Office report, Tancredo said potentially more than $1 billion in taxpayer money has been “squandered through waste, fraud and abuse.”
“This whole fiasco has been a perfect storm of corruption and incompetence at all levels” Tancredo said. “It’s time the taxpayer gravy train left the New Orleans station.” Tancredo said he had earlier warned that Louisiana officials could not be trusted with federal money.
“State and local officials have been shirking their responsibilities and taking advantage of taxpayers since before Day One,” he said. “Throwing more money at this debacle will do nothing but perpetuate more of the same.”
Andy Kopplin, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, said that the GAO report “points clearly to potential misspending by federal officials”—not those at the state or local levels. He chalks Tancredo’s remarks up to someone who is “trying to break out of a very large presidential field and hasn’t had much luck so far.”
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, in a statement, said there are “painstaking accountability measures in place to ensure every dollar is appropriately spent.”
Blanco said the $114 billion figure Tancredo referred to was an allocation spread among five states—Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Florida—in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma.
“Of this, it is estimated that federal commitments to Louisiana are roughly $60 billion. A substantial portion of this assistance was directed to emergency assistance and meeting short-term needs arising from the hurricanes, such as relocation assistance, emergency housing, immediate levee repair, and debris removal efforts, leaving less than $26 billion for actual ‘bricks and sticks’ rebuilding of permanent infrastructure,” Blanco said.
“We have undergone numerous audits, and we stand tall in the way Louisiana has honestly disbursed its federal dollars,” she said.
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Associated Press writer Becky Bohrer in New Orleans contributed to this story.
