Leadership Quote by Billy Tauzin

Turn disaster into a contest, and you get to look bold without committing to anything messy. Billy Tauzin's proposal carries the gleam of technocratic optimism: bring in "the best and brightest", dangle a "grand prize", harvest ideas, then let local officials pick the winner. It sounds democratic and merit-based, a kind of policy version of American Idol, except the stakes are a city.

The intent is pragmatic on its face: New Orleans needs redesign, and redesign needs expertise. But the subtext is about control and distance. By outsourcing the vision to a competition, responsibility shifts from elected leaders and federal agencies toward an abstract process. If the plan fails, blame can be diluted: the judges chose wrong, the locals implemented poorly, the scientists miscalculated. Meanwhile, the language of "designs" and "codes" frames catastrophe as a solvable engineering puzzle, not a social crisis with deep histories of segregation, poverty, and political neglect.

Context matters: post-Katrina America was awash in rage, grief, and opportunism. Calls for "new zoning" and "building codes" were never neutral; they touched who gets to return, what neighborhoods are rebuilt, and whether safety becomes a pretext for displacement. Tauzin tries to anchor legitimacy by insisting the state and city pick what "works best for Louisiana" - a nod to local sovereignty that also conveniently deflects federal culpability.

It's a quote that sells renewal as innovation, while quietly sidestepping the hardest question: safe for whom, and at what cost?