Along the Gulf Coast I heard politicians clamoring for new federal programs, but also citizens doubting they would do any good. The cynicism toward government reminded me of another decade, the 1970’s, partly because that was the decade of Watergate, but mainly because that was when I did my one stint of public service.

I spent a summer at a fishing pond in a Pittsburgh park, working on what today would be called a
multiagency task force. Our job — handing out bait and fishing poles — could have been easily done by two or three workers, but we had a staff of 20. Besides myself and another college student working for the county, there were two employees on the state payroll and 16 young teenagers who were paid by the federal Neighborhood Youth Corps.

That antipoverty program was supposed to inculcate work skills in the teenagers, and if any of them went on to become professional card players, then it succeeded. But otherwise they didn’t learn anything except how to play hearts, which was the only way we knew to keep them busy.

When they became bored with hearts, we began sending them home early every day. This worked so well that we took turns going home early ourselves. As long as one of us stayed around to hand out fishing poles, I figured, what was the harm to taxpayers?

Unfortunately, the other college student took it a step further on the days when he was left alone in
charge. He began closing a couple of hours early, and one day our county supervisor found out. The next day the supervisor arrived in a huge government sedan and summoned his ashen-faced employees to the curb for discipline.

”I can’t tolerate this,” he said, glaring at us for a long, terrifying pause. Then he jabbed his finger
out the window and announced, ”If you ever close early again, you won’t be paid for the hours.”

That was the moment I lost faith in government, and I kept remembering it as I listened to people along the Gulf Coast. Some of them sounded like people who’d stopped believing, too — and for much better reasons than mine. They had seen hurricane-force ineptitude.

”I’ve learned my lesson from Katrina,” said Dartanian Sanders, a laborer from Abita Springs, La.,
who’d spent three days driving through two states seeking help for his family. ”The lesson is to save
money and be self-reliant. Counting on the government in an emergency is like sending your kids to a candy store where the guy is selling drugs.”

The scenes from New Orleans prompted calls in Washington for a new war on poverty and racism. But in a national poll after the hurricane, conducted by the Pew Research Center, Americans’ attitudes on poverty and racism were largely unchanged compared with previous polls; if anything, they were slightly more likely than before to criticize the government for giving too much money to the poor.

The poll did find one notable change, when it asked whether the government is almost always wasteful and inefficient. The number of skeptics saying yes had been declining fairly steadily over the previous decade, falling to 47 percent last December. But after Katrina, the trend reversed and the skeptics became a majority, with 56 percent viewing government as mostly wasteful.

For those dreaming of another New Deal, the most hopeful finding in the poll was that about 3 in 10
people trust the government to do the right thing most or nearly all of the time — about the same percentage as before Katrina. But that’s still a distinct minority. And as the Pew Center notes, it’s in
”striking contrast” to people’s feelings after the Sept. 11 attacks, when 6 in 10 trusted the government.

That trust four years ago spurred Congress, against the objections of small-government Republicans, to create a federal force of airport screeners. It was supposed to be a new breed of efficient government agency, but during the evacuation of Houston it behaved pretty much like the one I worked in.