Since September 11, preparing for and responding to complex civil and humanitarian crises has emerged as one of America’s biggest challenges. From Afghanistan to Sudan, from Liberia to Iraq, breakdowns in governance have helped contribute to a range of problems, including terrorism, regional instability, genocide, and trafficking in drugs and arms. And as recent events have demonstrated, such failures can happen in unexpected places as a result of unforeseen events – the tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the Kashmir earthquake all led to profound breakdowns in governance and emergency response.

Responding to such challenges can be extraordinarily costly. Consider this: according to the most recent Congressional Budget Office estimate, the United States spent more than $100 billion in Iraq in 2005. Even before the invasion, we spent roughly $2.5 billion per year to contain Saddam.

But this is about more than the challenges we face in Iraq. When it comes to crisis response, the past year demonstrated the high cost of responding after the fact:

• We’ve pledged $156 million to help survivors of the earthquake in Kashmir.

• We’ve promised $1.1 billion to help with the tsunami relief efforts.

• And here at home, the Administration has said it will have to find $200 billion to recover from Katrina, Rita and Wilma.

Given such staggering sums, you would think that Congress and the Bush Administration would put a premium on disaster preparedness and prevention – but you’d be mistaken.

Despite everything that has happened over the past four years – from New York to New Orleans, from Afghanistan to Iraq – the Bush Administration’s approach to disaster prevention and response remains so unreflective and ad hoc that it borders on carelessness. In fact, the only thing that the President and his team have demonstrated is that they still don’t know what they’re doing or what comes next.

This goes far beyond the continued problems with FEMA. Take, for example, the state of U.S. planning for foreign disasters. In 2003, the Administration proposed a new initiative to give the United States the capacity to respond to, stabilize, and reconstruct regions affected by such disasters. It created the Office of the Coordinator for Stabilization and Reconstruction at the State Department and proposed setting up a new Crisis Response Fund. That isn’t much, but it’s a start.

However, as is the case with other new initiatives that this Administration has announced, you can gauge its true enthusiasm not by what it proposes, but rather by how hard it fights to make sure it gets funded. From the Millennium Challenge Account to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the Administration has promised billions only to stand aside silently when Congress chose to make major cuts.

Predicting and preventing humanitarian disasters is an imprecise science. In some ways, we can never know what we can prevent – or whether we can ever adequately prepare. No one expects our government to have the wherewithal or the capacity to prepare for the worst case. But we should be doing what we can to make sure we are never again caught flat-footed at home or abroad.

But when it comes to the new Stabilization Office and the Crisis Response Fund, the Administration only recently started to pay attention. Every year since the Administration announced these initiatives, Congress has minimized support for the Office and zeroed out money for the Fund. In response, the Administration has not uttered a word of protest.

Only in December did the President sign into law the Department of Defense Reauthorization bill, which includes up to $200 million to plan for and respond to crises. As he prepares to send to Congress his budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2007, the President needs to make it clear that he not only supports the continued funding for such a proposal, but also regards it as essential to national security.

Whether a result of inattention or incompetence, the failure of both the Administration and Congress to recognize the importance of planning and preparedness is literally a disaster waiting to happen. We can either spend money now to help ensure we are prepared, or we can spend hundreds of billions of dollars later to clean up the next mess. In an era of shrinking budgets and ballooning deficits, this is one bet we can ill-afford to make.

Charles J. Brown is President and CEO of Citizens for Global Solutions.

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