White House officials have told Congress that the $51.8 billion approved late last week will fund the disaster relief effort only through the first week of October, and senior congressional appropriations aides have told the White House that they need to see the next request by next week. Republicans say the next bill could exceed $50 billion.
The scale of the disaster has not even come into focus, largely because many agencies have not been allowed into the disaster zone to assess the damage, according to congressional appropriations aides, who are trying to examine the costs to the government, agency by agency.
Nearly 1,000 drinking-water and sewer systems -- 391 in Mississippi, 606 in Louisiana and one in Alabama -- remain shut down. Repairing and rebuilding such systems could cost between $3 billion and $10 billion, much of it on the tab of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Before Katrina struck, the federal highway emergency relief fund already faced a $120 million backlog of road repairs. With so many crumbled bridges and washed-out highways after the storm, the fund's deficit will now be in the billions, appropriations aides said.
The Air Force will seek as much as $4 billion to repair damaged Gulf-state facilities, a House Appropriations Committee aide said. An additional $2 billion to $4 billion will be needed to finance the mobilization of the National Guard, the evacuation of military personnel and military-family support programs. Damage to national parks, forests and wildlife refuges is estimated to approach $300 million.
Once the administration makes its request, congressional officials expect a cascade of demands from lawmakers. Farm-state members have signaled that they will seek substantial relief for midwestern grain farmers, whose shipments of grain down the Mississippi River were disrupted by Katrina. Even before the storm, parched farms in Illinois, Missouri and parts of Iowa had prompted farm-state lawmakers to seek relief.
Lawmakers from the Northeast have said they will push for $800 million or more in assistance to offset the soaring price of home heating oil. And state governments from Washington and South Dakota to West Virginia and South Carolina are expected to seek federal dollars to offset the cost of housing Katrina survivors.
The White House has declared 41 states and the District of Columbia either major disaster areas or in states of emergency, allowing federal aid to flow to any state that takes in an evacuee.
Against calls to trim spending elsewhere to accommodate the emergency, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) did little to close those floodgates when he suggested this week that the Republican-controlled Congress had already trimmed all the fat from federal spending. "My answer to those that want to offset the spending is 'Sure, bring me the offsets,' " he said. "I will be glad to do it, but no one is able to come up with any yet."
Against this tide, conservative think tanks are taking up DeLay's challenge. But their suggested spending cuts may only underscore Congress's flagging resolve.
To reach $62 billion in savings, Cato Institute analysts Chris Edwards and Stephen Slivinski have proposed cutting NASA in half, slashing energy research and subsidies just as Congress is gearing up to increase them in the face of soaring gasoline prices, cutting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' budget by $4.6 billion after its levees failed to protect New Orleans, and eliminating $4.2 billion in homeland security grants while lawmakers are debating the nation's lack of preparedness.
