Tell Congress to Extend Jobless Benefits for Hurricane Survivors

by Mike Hall, Jun 1, 2006

Hurricane season begins today.

Last week, House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) decided that extending the unemployment benefits that will expire June 4 for 80,000 still-jobless survivors of last year’s Gulf Coast hurricanes wasn’t worth a vote. Instead, he sent the House off on vacation until June 6.

In the Senate, Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) called “recess” without taking a vote on a bill that would extend the disaster unemployment benefits that average about $104 a week.

Maybe when they return tanned and rested, Republican congressional leaders will find time to act on the legislation (H.R. 5392 and S. 3030) that would give jobless hurricane survivors another 13 weeks of disaster unemployment benefits.

But neither bill is on the floor schedule of either chamber. You can click here to send a message to your lawmakers urging them to help families still struggling because of the hurricanes’ economic devastation and the lack of a strong federal effort to put people back to work.

In a related development, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who urged Hastert to act on the unemployment extension before the recess, released a report May 31 examining the Bush administration’s hurricane recovery record.

She said, “As hurricane season begins…the needs of so many Katrina survivors are still unmet and the system that failed them is still broken.”

Pelosi said 40,000 families still are waiting for Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers for temporary housing, just 4 percent of U.S. Small Business Administration disaster loans have been fully disbursed to small business owners in the region and the Bush administration’s disaster recovery and rebuilding contracts have gone to the politically connected. She said:

Over the last nine months, the Bush administration has demonstrated the same incompetence and cronyism that it displayed in the days before and after Katrina struck. More than $1 billion in funding for Katrina efforts is estimated to have been wasted. While families wait for housing, 10,000 mobile homes have sat unused in the mud in Hope, Ark. Until recently, most of the large Katrina contracts went to large contractors that were outside the Gulf Coast region and had political connections to the Bush administration. These contractors did little of the actual work, and yet were sometimes paid 15 times the actual cost of the job.

Click here to read the full report.

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