The Budget-Cutters Who Couldn't Stop Spending

The Republican Study Committee, one of the biggest groups in Congress, was created to rein in big spenders. So why can't it deliver?

Eric Pfeiffer from the December 2006 issue

div class="bodytext"> p class="Flargetext-1stpgph c2"> span class="c1">On September 15, 2005, two weeks after Hurricane Katrina had devastated the Gulf Coast, President Bush delivered a live television address from Jackson Square in New Orleans. As the power generators’ eerie light washed over his patch of an otherwise darkened section of the city, Bush pledged to add billions of dollars to an already bloated federal budget—to rebuild the region and, though he didn’t mention it, to deflect the political embarrassment of the government’s inept response to the storm. o:p> /o:p> /span> /p> p class="Flargetext c4"> span class="c3"> o:p> /o:p> /span> /p> p class="Flargetext c4"> span class="c3">Six days later, as dead bodies were still being pulled from the flooded city’s stagnant waters, members of the Republican Study Committee (