How Can Social Programs Respond to a Major Disaster?
Urban Institute
Programs that provide housing assistance, unemployment benefits, health care, and welfare to low-income people and others in the United States have a complex structure.
Even if this complexity can be juggled reasonably well for families, individuals, local governments, and states during normal times, however, Hurricane Katrina posed a severe test.
Hurricane Katrina dealt a severe blow to over a million people in Louisiana and the coastal regions of Mississippi and had repercussions throughout the Gulf region. Low-income families and individuals in particular bore the brunt of the storm and flooding, losing their homes, jobs, and resources for recovery.
Public programs had served many of these people before the hurricane hit, and many others became newly eligible as a result of it.
But the impact of Katrina strained the essential components of these programs, including their funding arrangements and eligibility and benefit standards.
Over the past seven months, a number of program changes and emergency expansions have been enacted through legislation or implemented through the executive branch.
But on the whole, programs have provided limited and temporary aid to families and individuals whose lives have been fundamentally disrupted by the storm.
In addition, some federal response policies have not been communicated clearly to state and local governments and were not acted upon for many months, even as the 2006 hurricane season approached.
This paper first summarizes key findings from the programs' responses to Hurricane Katrina.
