Was Katrina an Anti-Government Storm?

If you can't drown it in a bathtub, try a hurricane.

Jonathan Rauch | October 3, 2005

The Bush years have been a miserable time for advocates of smaller government. So why is Fred Smith, the irrepressible president of the anti-government, pro-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, smiling? In a word: Katrina.

Not the hurricane—the political storm. Smith grew up near New Orleans. His brother's home there was swamped. His sister, west of the city, found herself hosting nine refugees. But what cheers Smith is President Bush's now-notorious praise for Michael Brown, the embattled (and now former) head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

"It was almost like he couldn't have possibly said that," Smith said in a recent interview. "If that's what government thought a good job was, then frankly, we'd prefer a worse job done by anyone else."

Since the late 1990s, anger at Big Government has been on the political back burner, but Smith thinks the government's bungling response to Katrina—and its (as he expects) soon-to-be-bungled response to its bungled response—will change that. "You can have good government, or you can have Big Government," Smith says, "but you can't have good Big Government. That argument is growing dramatically, and I think Katrina is going to make it grow more."

On its face, Smith's ebullience seems odd. The Katrina aftermath looks like the next in a series of Bush-era growth spurts for government, following hard upon the Iraq war, the Medicare prescription drug program, and the No Child Left Behind Act. On Capitol Hill, leaders of both parties have left little doubt that they will spend what it takes, and probably more, to make waterlogged Katrina victims—and storm-damaged politicians—whole. Interest groups are circling hungrily. No wonder the Associated Press headlined recently, "Katrina Ushers in Return of Big Government."

So which way will the politics play? Will Katrina undermine government's credibility or enhance government's power? To judge by experience, the answer may be: both.