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Say Nothing About the Failing Satellite
The QuikScat satellite used for predicting the intensity and path of hurricanes could fail at any time (it's already past its designed lifetime). Without this satellite, the accuracy of US forecasters' predictions could be degraded by up to 16% — and there are no plans for any replacement. Bill Proenza, director of the National Hurricane Center, has been outspokenly critical of his superiors on this situation, but he has been warned to stop commenting on it.
Satellites don't just appear out of thin air. They have to be designed and built and tested and put onto a launch schedule. With NASA's already anemic budget being mostly eaten up by the money pit of the ISS to keep the Russians afloat and NOAA having huge commitments all over the place (Do you know how many programs and areas of responsibility NOAA has? It's staggering.) I imagine Congress just thinks it's cheaper to pay the cost of evacuating more people over the next ten years than pay the large upfront cost for getting a new satellite out NOW. That's the same reason the levee system in New Orleans was never improved, funnily enough. Congress decided it wasn't worth billions of dollars to prepare for a "once in 200 years" event. If it'll only happen once in 200 years, then you can stretch out the monetary damages over that time period as well (in theory). Preparing for a category 5 storm just isn't worth the cost.
The satellites had nothing to do with embarrassing anyone over Katrina. What's embarrassing is that my damn governor refused Federal help and let people die in their homes. Which (combined with the hugely incompetent recovery effort) is why she isn't running for re-election.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
"Quickscat is a different story. Quickscat was a NASA R&D bird . See http://winds.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/quikscat/index. cfm I'm not clear whether it was initially launched as NASA only and handed off to us, or if they "owned" the satellite while we did the ground systems for it."
As one of those toilers at JPL who worked on QuikSCAT: The instrument is a copy of one that was being built for a Japanese satellite. It was built in 13 months (hence the Quik) from spares from the one already in process, modified to fit on a commercially available satellite bus (Ball BCP2000) and launched on a surplus obsolete TitanII the AirForce had sitting around. The rush (normal spacecraft development is a 4-5 year process) was because the existing instrument, NSCAT, was on a satellite that failed after 6 months, leaving a big hole in the data, so QuikSCAT would fill in until the Japanese satellite launched and came on line (it launched late, and later failed)
The instrument was designed as part of an effort to collect 10 years or more of continuous data as part of an overall "understand the interactions of air and sea" program. So JPL developed a ground data system oriented towards that need (hosted at PODAAC). As it happens, we also had a real time feed of the data to NOAA (think of a "tee" early in the data pipeline), which, it turns out, has been very useful in the forecast business (back in 1999 and earlier, when this was all being done, people weren't sure it would be useful.. certainly not to the point of kicking in large sums of money to that end..). It took several years for the forecast community to start heavily using QS data (they were justifiably nervous about depending on an experimental satellite that was never intended to run this long...)
QS is actually operated by LASP in Colorado.