Leadership Quote by Allyson Schwartz

Schwartz is doing something politicians rarely admit in plain language: the spreadsheet is not reality. The line starts with a small act of rebellion against the rituals of fiscal certainty, insisting it is "reasonable" to expect the unreasonable. That word choice matters. She’s not asking for panic or blank checks; she’s building a commonsense bridge for voters who resent waste but have watched government get caught flat-footed. The argument is rhetorical jiu-jitsu: if emergencies are predictable as a category, then pretending they’re unforeseeable is the real irresponsibility.

The subtext is a critique of budgeting as performance. In Washington, "we can’t budget for that" often functions as moral cover: an excuse to underprepare, then overspend in crisis with less scrutiny. Schwartz flips the script. She’s saying: the failure isn’t that disasters cost money, it’s that we act shocked when they do.

Invoking Katrina is deliberate and loaded. Post-2005, Katrina became shorthand not just for a natural disaster, but for institutional neglect, racialized vulnerability, and the price of austerity-driven complacency. It’s also a bipartisan scar: a moment when governmental capacity, from planning to response, looked fragile on national television. By choosing Katrina, Schwartz anchors an abstract budget principle in a memory that still stings, making preparedness sound less like bureaucracy and more like basic competence. The intent is political realism: justify contingency funding, emergency reserves, and resilient infrastructure before the next televised failure arrives.