U.S. Disaster Response Probe Pledged

President Bush and congressional leaders pledged Tuesday to investigate the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, but disagreement erupted between Republicans and Democrats over the speed and scope of the inquiry and the need for changes in the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The White House, meanwhile, was preparing a request for another round of emergency funds of as much as $40 billion. The expanding cost of the recovery and the tone of the debate virtually guaranteed that Katrina would swamp Washington’s political landscape long after its floodwaters recede in New Orleans.

The administration has been forced to set aside other priorities while it tends to a natural disaster of immense proportions and defends itself against accusations that a flawed response made matters even worse.

On Capitol Hill, the Republican leader of a Senate committee said she was launching an investigation into the federal response.

Democratic leaders said the administration was not moving quickly enough to determine what went wrong last week and to undertake reforms to make sure any mistakes were not repeated.

Several called for an inquiry by an independent commission; one demanded the resignation of FEMA director Michael D. Brown.

The White House acknowledged that the initial government response to the unfolding tragedy was inadequate, and Bush promised to personally conduct an investigation into the actions of federal, state and local authorities last week.

“What I intend to do is ... to lead an investigation to find out what went right and what went wrong,” Bush told reporters at the end of a morning Cabinet meeting.

But the president gave no specifics as to how that investigation would be conducted.

And he said a more immediate priority was responding to the needs of the tens of thousands of residents of New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana and Mississippi who were displaced by the hurricane and the damage it wrought.

Bush said he was sending Vice President Dick Cheney to the region Thursday to assess the effectiveness of post-hurricane recovery efforts.

He said Cheney would work with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to remove any “bureaucratic obstacles” that might be slowing progress. The White House worked into the evening on a request for about $40 billion to fund hurricane relief efforts.

The emergency funding would be on top of a $10.5-billion package approved hastily Friday by Congress.

Last week’s appropriation “was only a down payment,” said Scott Milburn, a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget. “We’re writing the second installment now.”

White House officials said the request would be sent to Congress as early as today.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) said Congress could complete work on the aid bill by the end of the week.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) predicted a much greater infusion of cash would be needed for emergency efforts in the affected areas.

He said the recovery effort was costing more than the Iraq war on a daily basis, and that “an initial investment of $150 billion will be needed.”

Republican leaders said they wanted to investigate what went wrong with the initial relief effort. But there was no agreement on the nature of the investigation, how quickly it should begin or who should conduct it.

Some Democrats called for an independent group modeled after the Sept. 11 commission appointed by Bush in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

But DeLay said he did not believe such a commission was necessary. Instead, he called for a joint investigation by both chambers into what he said were the failures of federal, state and local authorities.

Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who lost his family home to the hurricane, pleaded with colleagues to focus on the daunting task of cleanup and reconstruction before trying to place blame.

“Please don’t have a hearing tying up people who need to make decisions,” Lott said.

What was needed in the ravaged Gulf Coast area, he said, was manpower. “Anybody in America who can get a chain saw and come to work -- we need that.”

Lott issued his plea after Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said the government had failed in its fundamental responsibility to protect citizens.

“In its initial response to the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina, particularly in Louisiana, governments at all levels failed in this obligation,” Collins said in announcing that her committee would investigate what went wrong.

There were disagreements that cut across parties over whether Congress had made a mistake when it folded FEMA into the much larger Department of Homeland Security.

Some said FEMA’s response to the hurricane was evidence the agency had been harmed by becoming part of a bigger bureaucracy that is focused largely on preventing and responding to terrorist attacks, not natural disasters.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) called for Brown, FEMA’s director, to be fired. But Bush has expressed his support for Brown, and GOP leaders have said it would only harm FEMA’s efforts to replace him now.

Growing sentiment to conduct a major investigation suggested that the federal government’s response to the disaster would remain a major political issue for months to come.

Just as the days after Sept. 11, 2001, formed the defining moment of George W. Bush’s first term, it was beginning to look as if the days after Aug. 29, 2005 -- when the levees were breached in New Orleans -- might become the defining moment of his second.

“It’s a test of his ability to govern,” said David Winston, a GOP pollster.

Even as investigations of the federal response loom, Bush and his advisors stressed that they were concentrating on the relief efforts, not the “blame game,” a phrase they used repeatedly on Tuesday.

“We’ve got to solve problems,” Bush said at the Cabinet meeting. “We’re problem-solvers.”

Some Republicans said the widespread criticism that the government bungled its response to the hurricane posed a nearly unprecedented test of Bush’s style of leading, which is typically to be slow to admit mistakes and be long on loyalty to members of his team.

“Will they fire someone? That’s not his modus operandi,” said Glen Bolger, a Republican political consultant. “But they have never been in a situation like this before in his presidency where things went so badly wrong.”

One measure of the political peril facing Bush was an ABC News-Washington Post poll last week that found Americans almost evenly split on whether the president was managing the crisis well or not (46% said he was; 47% said he wasn’t).

Typically, Americans rally to support the president after a crisis. In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush’s approval rating soared to the 90% mark.

Acknowledging that evacuees in many states would need help for an indefinite period of time, Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said the administration was putting together a plan to provide a range of medical and social services.

Some lawmakers called for using the government’s refugee program, which has helped resettle tens of thousands of Vietnamese, Cubans, Somalis and others displaced by conflicts overseas.

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended the military’s response to Katrina.

“Not only was there no delay, I think we anticipated, in most cases -- not in all cases, but in most cases -- the support that was required,” Myers said.

Staff writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, John Hendren, James Gerstenzang, Janet Hook, Doyle McManus, Edwin Chen, Greg Miller and Maura Reynolds contributed to this report.