GULFPORT, Miss.—Haley Barbour pawed at his face, his eyes glistening from his seat on the dais as yet another speaker praised the former Mississippi governor’s leadership in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
It was Friday, Aug. 29, 2025, and the 77-year-old Republican was seated along with local, state and federal officials for an event meant to commemorate the storm’s 20th anniversary under the Barksdale Pavilion in the Small Craft Harbor in Gulfport.
“Everyone under this pavilion today and everyone in the State of Mississippi was fortunate to have Governor Barbour at the helm during Katrina,” Gov. Tate Reeves said as rain pattered on the harbor around them. “He showed the world what it meant to be an effective leader during a crisis. He had a steady hand, and his tireless advocacy helped guide our faith through this dark time.”
When Barbour spoke, he repeated words he had used many times before to describe the aftermath of Katrina: “It looked like the hand of God had wiped away the coast.”
He recalled the vow he made to the Mississippi Legislature to rebuild the Mississippi Gulf Coast and to make it bigger and better than before. If all officials did was rebuild what was there before, he said, “we will have failed.”
‘Certain People Were Left Out’
The very pavilion where Barbour stood and the harbor that sheltered him and hundreds of attendees at the ceremony were evidence of that ambition. It was also a reminder of the fact that, despite widespread praise for his leadership after the disaster two decades ago, Barbour’s actions after Katrina were often controversial.
After Hurricane Katrina, Congress designated billions in U.S. Housing and Urban Development Community Development Block Grant funds to help low-income and moderate-income people who had lost homes in the storm. But in 2008, Barbour announced his plans to redirect $570 million of that to expand the port in Gulfport, with only 13% of the CDBG funds going to help Katrina survivors struggling to secure housing amid skyrocketing insurance rates.
Congress had already declined Barbour’s request to directly fund the port expansion project when it approved part of the housing funds in 2006, but Republican President George W. Bush’s HUD secretary, Steven C. Preston, granted a waiver allowing Barbour to use the funds for the port project anyway.
Gulfport rebuilt the Small Craft Harbor where Barbour and other officials gathered on Aug. 29, 2025, using $6.6 million of those federal housing funds. The money also built the pavilion that is now named for Jim Barksdale, the former Netscape CEO whom Barbour tapped to lead a commission focused on post-Katrina recovery.
“Though the storm did not intentionally discriminate, the damage did reveal the impact of decades-long discrimination against poor, African American people who were already living in substandard housing,” the Jackson Free Press reported then-Mississippi NAACP CEO Derrick Johnson (who now leads the national NAACP) as saying in 2008, when his organization and others in the state sued over Barbour’s use of the funds. “For the first time in our state’s history, we have the resources to right this wrong. It is a matter of priorities. Now is not the time to pull the carpet back over the ugly stain of segregation.”
Under Barbour, the State ultimately agreed in a 2010 settlement to direct $132 million of the funds to help low-income Mississippians’ housing needs, but most of the money remained dedicated to port projects.
“We were most offended by the fact that … at a time where the community on the coast needed this money the most, the focus was on expanding this port,” Kimberly Jones Merchant of the Mississippi Center for Justice, which was part of the lawsuit, told the Mississippi Free Press last month. “The truth is, the recovery was disjointed, oftentimes confusing, and of course, certain people were left out.”
‘Hitched Up Their Britches’
During his remarks on Aug. 29, Barbour recalled the days and weeks after Katrina as a time of bipartisan unity when leaders were “not the Republicans and Democrats,” but instead came together to address Hurricane Katrina together. Barbour, who co-founded and ran one of the most powerful lobbying firms in history, has long been an avowed partisan Republican and political strategist, including for former Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. He also served as the chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1997.
His connections paid off when Katrina hit Mississippi, especially with a Republican president in office. Barbour lobbied Congress for billions in recovery funds, and some of that came at the expense of then-Democratic-led Louisiana, where 1,392 died and New Orleans suffered catastrophic damage from levee failures. Even though Louisiana suffered 75% of the damage, the funds Congress ultimately appropriated for Katrina recovery prevented any one state from getting more than 54% of the funds.
Kathleen Blanco, the former governor who led Louisiana through Katrina, would later say in a 2008 interview with Ellen Ann Fentress that Barbour “didn’t care how much anyone else got. He only cared how much he got.” She also called his strategy then “very racial.”
“They knew they were putting it on us,” she said. “They figured out how much they needed and put in that limitation.”
But while majority-Black New Orleans faced accusations in some media narratives of wanting a handout from the federal government after Katrina, Barbour portrayed Mississippians as self-reliant.
“Finally, the greatest hero of Katrina, the people of Mississippi who got knocked down flat, got back up, hitched up their britches and went to work,” he wrote in an Aug. 29, 2025, opinion piece about his successes after Hurricane Katrina for Mississippi Today, a publication that Jim Barksdale helped cofound in 2016. “They went to work helping themselves and helping their neighbors. Our people did more in Katrina to improve our state’s image than anything that has happened in my lifetime.”
Protesters Decry Trump’s FEMA Plans
Ocean Springs, Mississippi, resident Diana Odom says she was “one of the lucky ones” when Hurricane Katrina pummeled the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The storm ripped her apartment’s roof off, forcing her to move in with family while she looked for housing at a time when there was no housing on the coast, but she survived.
On Aug. 29, she stood holding up a cardboard protest sign and wearing a black raincoat outside the Barksdale Pavilion.
Odom was not there to remember what she lost in 2005; she was there to warn about what the nation could lose as the Trump administration has moved to downsize the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“It’s the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and instead of actually trying to make sure our state is supported through FEMA properly, they’re gutting FEMA and politicizing it, and that’s just really shameful to me as a person who was here during the storm,” she told the Mississippi Free Press.
Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump floated the idea of “getting rid of FEMA” and letting “states take care of the tornadoes and the hurricanes.” Since, states have seen delays in getting assistance after disasters. In Mississippi, it took months for tornado victims in Walthall County, Miss., to get help from the federal government.
Trump appointed a 12-person council, including former Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant as its vice chairman. Trump and one of the members of the council, U.S. Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem, have both floated the idea of distributing FEMA aid using more flexible block grants, similar to the ones Barbour used from HUD for port projects after Katrina.
On the podium under the pavilion, Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. director of national intelligence, said she was “grateful to serve in President Trump’s cabinet because he is someone who looks at what happens and recognizes what needs to be fixed based on those lessons learned.” She pointed to Barbour’s leadership and how he was “able to get the resources ultimately necessary to serve your community here.”
“President Trump recognized this, which is what has driven his changes to FEMA, to say it is those of you who are here on the ground who know what’s happening the best. You know what is needed more than any bureaucrat in Washington,” she said. “And so the federal government should provide that direct support and that direct aid to the state, cut the bureaucracy and the red tape so that the right things and the right priorities and the right people are being served with those federal resources.”
During a press forum in Jackson, Mississippi, in March, Haley Barbour reiterated his support for FEMA when asked about Trump’s cuts to the agency.
Despite criticisms after Katrina, “FEMA did a whole lot more right than wrong,” Barbour said, noting that he is “not a critic of FEMA.”
As members of the Mississippi National Guard joined the hundreds who sat under the pavilion, Odom and the other protesters also spoke up against Gov. Tate Reeves’ decision to deploy 200 Mississippi National Guard members to Washington, D.C., as part of what Trump claims is an effort to curtail crime in the capital.
“It’s really shameful to me that the governor was willing to send troops to D.C. rather than to be here ready to deploy for hurricanes,” she said. “It doesn’t seem right.”
Heather Harrison contributed to this report.
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