Congressional Inquiries

Gulf States Continue to Struggle Post Katrina

Congress provided more than $8.1 billion to Louisiana to help rebuild housing destroyed by wind and flood damage in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The state established the Road Home program to disburse these funds to eligible homeowners.Homeowners who applied for Road Home grants faced long wait times. A recent RAND study found that only 31 percent of applicants had received grants by mid-December 2007 (the study's end date for data collection). Of those applicants who did receive grants, about half waited more than eight months. One-quarter waited at least 10 months, and others waited even longer. As of the study's conclusion, thousands of homeowners were still waiting, including some who had been among the earliest to apply.

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One In Five Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Suffer from PTSD or Major Depression

Nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan — 300,000 in all — report symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slightly more than half have sought treatment.

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Economic Burden of Health Insurance Increasing for Small Employers Providing Health Insurance

The economic burden of providing health insurance for workers increased more for small businesses than for large ones from 2000 to 2005, but the spike did not cause a significant number of small employers to abandon the benefit. Currently, Congress is working on several pieces of legislation aiming to decrease the costs of health insurance to small business owners and employees.

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RAND Focuses on Impact of Sustained Operations on Army Readiness

Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Army is "out of balance," and that demand for forces for Iraq and Afghanistan "exceeds the sustainable supply." In Stretched Thin: Army Forces for Sustained Operations, a team of RAND researchers led by Lynn Davis assessed the tradeoffs between the number of combat units deployed, the length of deployments and the time that soldiers have at home—as well as the overall impact of sustained operations on the Army's readiness for other contingencies.

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RAND Focuses on Water Management Issues

Water management agencies face a difficult challenge of planning under uncertainty. Traditionally agencies draft their water management plans assuming that their regions' future climate and all its variability will be similar to that experienced historically. Unfortunately, this planning assumption seems increasingly unlikely to hold in the future. As part of a multiyear project on improving decision making under uncertainty, RAND researchers have been helping water management agencies in California identify their vulnerabilities to future climate change and their best options for reducing those vulnerabilities.

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RAND Focuses on Water-Efficiency Programs

Another way that water managers can manage their water resources is to encourage water-efficiency programs among their end users. But evaluating the cost-effectiveness of water-efficiency programs can be difficult, because not all the benefits are easily quantified. A RAND study proposes an exploratory modeling approach to accommodate the significant uncertainty in such estimates, which demonstrates by evaluating the benefits of Denver Water's efficiency programs.

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RAND Focuses on Water Efficiency in Commercial Buildings

Water efficiency is critical to end users, such as commercial buildings, which depend on water both inside (for restrooms and cooling systems) and outside (for landscaping). While building owners have many options to improve water efficiency, analyzing the economics of such investment options can be difficult because of significant uncertainties about such things as the future costs of water. RAND researchers developed an analytical framework and an easy-to-use spreadsheet-based tool—the Building Water Efficiency Analysis Model, or BEAM—to help building managers, consultants, and efficiency service representatives make sensible water-use efficiency investments.

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