As Congress Reviews What Went Wrong, It Finds Itself in Disarray

Hesitant to interfere with relief operations in the storm-ravaged South, lawmakers in Washington will be left to grill veterans of past disasters. That is emblematic of how hard it is for Congress to grapple with the calamity that has washed away much of the rest of its legislative agenda.

The hurricane is testing Congress' ability to do something that the lumbering institution is ill-equipped to do: move quickly and decisively on a huge, bipartisan project.

In their early response, members of Congress instead have been doing what seems to come more naturally: spending lots of money, hurling partisan insults and holding hearings -- even if the most pertinent witnesses cannot attend.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) has decried the lack of focus in Congress' response so far and called on GOP leaders and the White House to do more to set priorities among the ideas, bills and hearings flowing through the Capitol.

"I have been extremely concerned about this because I think we are going to wake up six months from now or three months from now and realize that a haphazard approach has not been effective either in resolving the problems in the Gulf Coast or in managing the taxpayers' money effectively," Gregg said Monday on the Senate floor.

Sharing those concerns, Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) has prepared a letter to President Bush urging him to put a coordinator in charge of overseeing spending on the recovery effort. "Who's going to manage and help Congress decide what to fund?" he asked in an interview. "Conventional approaches are going to cause total chaos. If we leave it up to committees, if we leave it up to individual claimants telling us what they need, we're in for a real mess."

Republican leaders have tried to coordinate plans for investigating what went wrong in the hurricane response by proposing a joint House-Senate committee. But even that has not gotten off the ground, because Democrats have objected that it would be stacked in favor of Republicans and prone to cover up rather than investigate the Bush administration's mistakes.