Transcript
JAMES B. STEINBERG: Like so many Americans, we at Brookings have been very taken not only on the professional, but on a personal level, by the enormous tragedy and experience that the people of the Gulf Coast are going through, and in addition to our own sense of personal commitment and the efforts that individuals are making here, one of the things that we recognized in reflecting on Katrina and its aftermath is that in an institution of the breadth of public policy analysis such as Brookings, we really have a lot of people who've done a lot of work on so many issues related to Katrina and how we think about both what happened and what we should do going forward.
And we wanted to begin to try to share with you some of our preliminary thoughts based on our own analysis and experience on a number of related areas, beginning today with the four panelists that you have today. But I think you'll see in the days and weeks to come that there are a number of other aspects of Brookings work, and we hope to have several of these sessions over the next couple of weeks. And so while we've chosen a few of the topics in which Brookings is doing related work to discuss in our briefing today, there are so many others that we want to have a chance to discuss with you going forward. So think of this as an appetizer rather than the full meal.
We're going to focus on a couple of issues today, trying very hard, for the most part, to look forward to what do we do from here, although, of course, in trying to understand what we need to do next, we have to have a little bit of understanding of how we got to where we got to.
Like everybody else here, we're not particularly interested in playing the blame game, but I do think that there needs to be some understanding of some of the problems that we faced and why the results have not been what everybody would have wanted them to be in order to understand what's necessary going forward.
We're going to begin by looking at this through the lens of what has happened in the government thinking about response to crises and events of great national significance in the post-9/11 environment with Richard Falkenrath, who was the—really the point man in many respects in the early years, the first term of the Bush Administration, in thinking about how both to reorganize the Federal Government and how to think about incidents of national catastrophe, looking through the lens not only of the post-9/11 environment, but the whole effort to think about the role of the Federal Government in addressing these questions. And then turn to Pietro Nivola, the Director of our Governmental Studies Program—Governance Studies Program—to look at the broader implications for Federalism here. We've had a lot of debate in this country over the last several days about the respective responsibilities of state, local, and federal government and what lessons this holds for our federal system.
Then we're going to turn to Michael O'Hanlon, who's going to focus on one particular dimension of the response, which is the question of what is and should be the role of the military, not only the National Guard and Reserve, but also the active duty military, which, as you've seen, has become more actively involved in the response in recent days.
And finally, we're going to turn to an issue which I think has gotten relatively little attention up 'til now, but I think will clearly be the focus of so much of what we see going forward, including a very dramatic set of issues around both funding and strategy, with Amy Liu, the Deputy Director of our Metropolitan Policy Program, on strategies for thinking about recovery and reconstruction.
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