mr. wilhite, what has happened since then? >> well, one of the key difficulties of government whether it's national government or state government in dealing with drought is coordination of the various agencies and so forth of that government on the drought issue, because they'll have different responsibilities. so the disaster recovery program was an attempt to coordinate the activities of the federal agencies to focus their efforts to make sure that i think all of the key issues were being addressed and i think this has been a very positive movement on the part of this administration. this is really the first time that i know of that this has happened. so i think you saw a vast improvement in terms of the delivery of response, sir versus in different programs, reduction in the amount of time that it took to designate areas as eligible for disaster assistance. for example through the u.s. department of agriculture, so these were all positive steps. once again it's reactive. so we need to put in place more proactive measures t

mr. wilhite. west texas will, this is a question for our audience. west texas will be entering into its third year of severe drought. yet little has been done to prepare for long-term drought. what should be done to address this type of situation? where they find themselves again in the same situation. >> well, this is not only an issue for west texas. it's an issue for most of the country. one of the things, and it was pointed out earlier, with regard to the drought issue is that drought virtually affects every part of this country. there's a tendency to think that drought is a western issue, but i think we've seen in recent decades that drought has become very severe on places in the east coast, southeast, south central and so forth. so it's not just a western issue. in the case of west texas, in the case of regions throughout the country, it's very important that states put in place proactive, risk reduction plans to deal with a drought. and this needs to cascade from the state level down to the local level. so the local communities are also putti