"President Bush is expected to shift $1.3 billion away from raising and armoring levees, installing floodgates and building permanent pumping in Southeast Louisiana in order to plug long-anticipated financial shortfalls in other hurricane-protection projects, a move Sen. David Vitter describes as a retreat from the president's commitment to protect the whole New Orleans area."
"The reason the West Bank projects are running short of money is that Congress asked the corps last year to hastily pull together estimates. What are normally months-long calculations were reduced in some cases to days. Subsequent increases in the cost of materials and labor further ballooned the price of the projects. But Vitter's point is that if the shortfalls are now clear, why not ask Congress for more money?"
Maybe there's a reason he didn't mention Katrina in the State of the Union.
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