Hurricane relief closely questioned

WASHINGTON – Lawmakers from both parties sharply questioned nearly every aspect of the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina on Thursday, focusing their discontent on suspect contracts and eliciting a pledge that hundreds of millions of dollars in deals awarded with no competition would soon be put up for bid.

Nine House and Senate panels held hearings on hurricane relief, with a sense of frustration frequently bursting to the surface. Several members chastised administration officials, citing tales of Gulf State small businesses losing work to giants such as Halliburton Co. Others challenged administration stances on tax breaks and health care for the displaced.

Under questioning about the agency’s reliance on contracts that lacked full and open bidding, R. David Paulison, the acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said, “I’ve been in public service a long time, and I’ve never been a fan of no-bid contracts.”

Asked by Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., why the agency did not hold competitions before Katrina struck, Paulison replied that “all of those no-bid contracts, we are going to go back and rebid. We’re in the process of rebidding them already.”

A FEMA spokeswoman later said the new bidding process affects only the four largest no-bid deals. Those are $100 million contracts awarded to the Shaw Group, Bechtel Corp., CH2M Hill Inc. and Fluor Corp. to find and engineer sites for temporary housing for displaced residents.

The agency said Thursday that it has no plans to compete numerous other deals signed in the wake of Katrina with little or no competition. Also, FEMA has already committed a large amount of money to the four firms doing the housing site work – $49.2 million in the case of Bechtel.

The day’s events indicated the administration has yet to regain its footing since its slow response to the hurricane’s initial onslaught more than a month ago.

In a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., called the Department of Homeland Security “dysfunctional” and suggested that Congress should rescind half the more than $60 billion it has provided for the relief effort unless FEMA can better document how it is being spent.

Members of both parties raised doubts that President Bush’s proposed business tax breaks would lure employers and employees back to the battered Gulf Coast. Meanwhile, a continuing dispute over health care for Katrina evacuees led Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, to sharply rebuke Treasury Secretary John Snow. For weeks, the administration has blocked legislation that would temporarily expand Medicaid eligibility rules and raise federal health care reimbursement rates to states affected by the hurricane.

“Tell the White House to back off our bill,” Grassley told Snow. “There are people hurting down there, and we want to get them help.”