"Windfall: How Conservatives, Contractors, and Developers Cashed In on Katrina"

By Jean Casella and James Ridgeway / from Mother Jones

(Some snips from the timeline - all dates in 2005):
September 6

The Katrina disaster becomes an enormous boon to contractors with friends in high places. One of the first to swing into action is Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, which begins work repairing Gulf Coast Naval and Marine facilities under a pre-existing arrangement with the Department of Defense. Fast Forward: By the end of the year, KBR has secured contracts worth nearly $170 million. It can't have hurt that KBR had retained the services of former FEMA director (and Bush crony) Joseph Allbaugh, who had registered as a lobbyist for the company six months prior to Katrina. Allbaugh also lobbied on behalf of the Shaw Group, which is owned by the chair of the Louisiana Democratic Party. Shaw received two $100 million no-bid contracts shortly after Katrina.

September 8

Congress approves a second White House request for Katrina relief spending, bringing the total to $62.3 billion. Members of Congress and watchdog groups immediately raise questions about the procurement process for Katrina-related contracts, including insufficient oversight and lack of competitive bidding.

By executive order, the president suspends the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires federal contractors to pay the regional prevailing wage, in areas hit by Katrina. The move is attacked by organized labor and praised by anti-government conservatives.

September 9

In a memo to all federal contracting agencies, the Department of Labor suspends affirmative action requirements on all reconstruction contracts.

Baton Rouge Republican Congressman Richard Baker is overheard telling a group of lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

September 10

The first of several contracts from FEMA and the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals for the recovery of bodies is awarded to Kenyon International, whose parent company, Service Corporation International (SCI), a Bush campaign contributor, has previously been implicated in a high-profile scandal in Texas. The company has also been sued for illegally dumping and desecrating corpses in Florida. Fast Forward: After two months, Kenyon bills the State of Louisiana more than $6 million for collecting 535 bodies. New Orleans' numerous family-owned African American funeral homes, meanwhile, are turned down when they offer to volunteer their services after the disaster, and none receive any subcontracts from Kenyon to bury victims.

September 21

The Republican Study Committee, a group that includes Congress' most conservative members, issues its own plan for paying for Katrina recovery, which it calls "Operation Offset." The plan aims to reduce the federal budget by nearly $100 billion in 2006 alone and nearly $950 billion over 10 years—nearly five times the projected cost of hurricane reconstruction. OMB Watch, the government watchdog group, later describes the proposal as "a historical laundry list of nearly every budget cut Republicans have proposed, imagined or yearned for over the years." These include cuts to most entitlement programs that serve the poor, as well as an array of the right's favorite targets—from foreign aid and family planning for teens to the National Endowment for the Arts and Corporation for Public Broadcasting.


In response to "Operation Offset," the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out that nearly 40 percent of the cuts are in assistance to the nation's lowest-income residents, which would disproportionately affect African Americans, women, children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled—in other words, the same vulnerable groups that had suffered most from Hurricane Katrina.

In one of the first comprehensive reports on the environmental impact of the storm, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group offers a grim assessment. The affected areas are a center of the oil, gas, and chemical industries and "home to 31 hazardous waste sites and 466 industrial facilities that handle large quantities of hazardous substances." Numerous oil spills and the widespread release of toxic chemicals add to the existing public health crisis. Contributing to the disaster is a history of weak environmental regulation in the region.

October 6

After criticism from both parties during congressional hearings, FEMA's new acting director, R. David Paulison, announces that four $100 million no-bid contracts awarded for Katrina relief (including one granted to the Shaw Group) will be reopened for competitive bidding, with an eye toward hiring more small businesses and minority-owned firms. Fast Forward: A month later, the Department of Homeland Security postpones the rebidding process until February 2006. In the end, only a fraction of the work is reopened for bidding.

November 1

Governor Blanco announces plans to conduct a series of meetings on budget cuts. On the first day (November 6), she announces $500 million in cuts from the Louisiana state budget, with health care and higher education taking the biggest hits. Blanco and her supporters say the cuts reflect the expected precipitous drop in tax revenues—but critics point to the large tax breaks being offered to business and industry in the name of encouraging reconstruction.

December 1

For the first time since Katrina struck, residents of the Lower Ninth Ward are permitted to visit their homes after being given shots and masks and passing through National Guard troops that have been blocking access to certain neighborhoods. Meanwhile, residents have been locked out of public housing projects. Many dangers to health and safety are real, but policies—and plans for the city's reconstruction—seem designed to discourage the return of African Americans and especially low-income residents, wiping certain neighborhoods off the map while enriching developers and corporate contractors.
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See also: "Looting Homeland Security" in Rolling Stone.