Political Quotes

“I want to thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, the reality, as the gentleman from Indiana noted earlier, is that we are going to have disasters and we are going to spend funds responding to those disasters. The problem with the United States disaster management policy is that it is backward. It is entirely reactive. Rather than going in before a disaster happens and making areas more resilient, making our ecosytem more resilient, making our economy more resilient, we are dead set on this process of coming in after disasters and spending exponentially more dollars. The ranking member referenced a few figures a little while ago. He referenced a figure of a CBO study indicating that, for every $1 we invest in the right type of hazard mitigation, we save $3 in disaster response cost. There was another study that FEMA did. For every $1 we invest, we have $4 in cost savings. I think, Mr. Speaker, with the right criteria, you actually even save more. Now, we are challenged as a Nation right now because the agency that is primarily responsible for making our communities more resilient is the U.S. Army Corps Engineers, which, unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, is stuck on stupid. What we have seen over the last several years is, rather than trying to fix that, we have seen other agencies coming up being granting agencies. We have seen FEMA. This year we have seen the Department of the Interior in the President's budget. In the recent years, we have seen HUD.…”