WASHINGTON -- In a rush to keep hurricane-relief efforts going in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, Congress yesterday approved $51.8 billion in additional spending to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Susan Walsh, Associated Press President Bush announces initiatives aimed at helping people "get back on their feet" yesterday in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C. Click photo for larger image.

President Bush signed the measure last night.

The legislation funneled $50 billion to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, for its disaster-relief efforts, which will include unemployment insurance and temporary housing for victims as well as damage assessment of houses hit by the storm. More than $23 billion of the FEMA funds will be used to help individuals, and $7.6 billion has been set aside to assist state and local governments rebuild infrastructure.

An additional $1.4 billion was earmarked for Department of Defense relief and security operations, and $400 million was allocated to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Defense Department funds cover deployment of military personnel in affected communities. The Corps money is marked for costs associated with flood control and for repairs to pump stations and levees.

Leaders from both parties underscored that it was an intermediate measure -- possibly carrying operations only through the next few weeks -- that would be part of a relief effort that could eventually cost more than $150 billion.

In anticipation of the new relief package, Bush spoke to Hurricane Katrina victims yesterday from the White House, telling them that he had directed FEMA to give each household affected by the hurricane $2,000 for "immediate needs." He also said he was granting "evacuee status" to all victims from counties declared as disaster areas -- allowing them to register forMedicaid, food stamps, housing and unemployment compensation in any state without having to complete burdensome paperwork.

"The people who have been hurt by this storm ... need to know that the government is going to be with you for the long haul," Bush said.

The president also told state leaders that he would work with Congress to reimburse those states taking in evacuees. He declared Sept. 16 as a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance to honor those killed by the hurricane and said it would be a time for Americans to come together to pray "with hope for a brighter future and with the humility to ask God to keep us strong, so that we can better serve our brothers and sisters in need."

Though there were moments of bipartisanship yesterday as the House and Senate overwhelmingly passed the new $52 billion relief measure, a number of lawmakers said they were nervous about the immensity of the aid package. Last month, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the fiscal 2005 deficit would be $331 billion.

Conservative Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said borrowing the $52 billion without making comparable cuts in the federal budget amounted to "stealing" from America's grandchildren. He said he was disappointed in Bush. "We have chosen political expediency over the future of our country," said Coburn, who agreed to vote for the bill but accused Congress of doing the "easy thing."

Earlier in the day, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan acknowledged that the disaster spending would have "an impact on the budget." But he described the expenditures as one-time costs and said the administration would do "whatever it takes to meet the needs of those on the ground."

Other lawmakers raised concern about who would oversee the money's distribution. Some Democrats and several Republicans -- including New Mexico Sen. Pete V. Domenici and Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, whose state was struck by the hurricane -- said they wanted Bush to appoint someone outside the government to guard the billions of dollars earmarked for disaster relief and make sure that it was being spent for legitimate projects. Sessions said the borrowed "pot of free money" could lead to haggling at all levels of government.

"State and local governments are going to look around and see all this money coming out, and they're going to want every dime they can get," Sessions said, adding that he believed that every "federal agency that can dump part of their budget on disaster money" would do so. "Somebody's going to have to watch them," he said. "... We need some real accountability here, and these agencies are stretched to the limit."

Asked about whether the White House planned to appoint "a czar" to oversee the relief funds, McClellan yesterday said the White House welcomed "all the ideas that are being discussed," but that the president was focused first on the "immediate needs" of hurricane victims.

The Corps of Engineers and FEMA must give weekly reports to Congress on how the funds are being used, congressional leaders emphasized. And $15 million has been set aside for the Department of Homeland Security inspector general to audit and investigate how the funds are being disbursed.

As Congress debated the emergency legislation, recriminations and bickering continued between the parties over the Bush administration's handling of the storm.

The key point of contention was the intent of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Illinois, to appoint a Republican-led committee to investigate the federal response to the hurricane -- a decision that Democratic leaders criticized as an attempt to cover up mistakes.

Democrats are calling for an independent commission, modeled on the Sept. 11th Commission that investigated intelligence lapses. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., yesterday said they would not appoint Democratic members to serve on the panel GOP leaders have proposed.

"Despite all the talk of bipartisanship, [Republicans] have just -- on their own, unilaterally -- put forth a proposal that will result in a whitewash of what is going on here," Pelosi said. "We must have an outside independent commission."

Reid said "the only way to ensure that all levels of our government are held accountable to the people is to take this process out of the hands of politicians with a vested interest in the outcome."

But Republicans insisted that the commission would be bipartisan, although they still had not settled on how many Democrats and Republicans it would include, nor who those people would be yesterday. GOP leaders said they were looking to model the committee on the one that led the investigation into the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.

They said appointing one committee to look at where the government had failed would let officials involved in the relief efforts on the ground continue their work without having to travel back and forth to Washington to testify before multiple committees.

"Things did not go perfectly; we all know that," Frist said yesterday when asked after a White House meeting about Democrats' objections to the GOP-proposed panel. "A lot of the initial criticism was at our federal government. I think increasingly people see that there was a system-wide failure at the local level, at the state level and at the federal level. ... We'll get to the bottom of that."

Hastert was blunt: "People can join in and help get the job done, or some people can stand aside and criticize," he said. "But you know, we have work to do. We can't be distracted by partisanship, by finger-pointing, by name-calling."

Though most Democrats voted for the $52 billion aid package -- the Senate passed the measure 97-0; the House 410-11 -- some took issue with the fact that most of the money would go to FEMA, an agency whose leader they have continually described as incompetent this week. All Western Pennsylvania House members as well as the state's two Republican senators voted in favor of the disaster-aid legislation.

Congress has also been working on a number of other Hurricane Katrina-related bills ranging from additional help for students to extending programs that assist needy families. Both houses also passed a measure allowing the federal courts affected by the hurricane to convene outside their jurisdiction.