This blog post will be updated throughout the day as the President travels to New Orleans to meet with the Mayor and residents who have rebuilt their lives since the storm. Stay tuned here for updates on the trip and to watch his remarks at 4:55 p.m. EDT.

Today's Schedule:

EDT

10:45AM        The President departs the White House en route to Joint Base Andrews
11:00AM        The President departs Joint Base Andrews en route to New Orleans, Louisiana

CDT

12:20PM         The President arrives in New Orleans, Louisiana
12:45PM         The President meets with residents and youth, New Orleans, Louisiana
2:55PM           The President participates in a resilience roundtable, Andrew P. Sanchez Community Center, New Orleans, LA
3:55PM           The President delivers remarks, Andrew P. Sanchez Community Center, New Orleans, LA
5:00PM           The President departs New Orleans en route to Washington, DC

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Since taking office, President Obama has made it a key priority to continue and expedite the recovery and rebuilding efforts since Hurricane Katrina, the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, by:

• Supporting the needs of survivors
• Bolstering the recovery efforts already underway by state, local, and federal officials by cutting red tape to deploy important resources quickly
• Investing in hard-hit communities
• Ensuring that affected communities build back stronger and more resilient
• The President has directed his Administration to take an all-of-nation approach — to work closely with and support the work of all of our partners, including state and local governments, tribal and volunteer organizations, the private sector, and families

10 years after Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Coast is building back stronger and more resilient:

98% of families displaced by Katrina are back in their homes.

We've provided more than $5.2 billion since 2009 for rebuilding schools, hospitals, roads, police and fire stations, and historic museums and buildings.

Read more on the Administration's post-Katrina recovery efforts.

See what community-building programs are already at work in your area with this interactive map.

Share how you’ve seen these programs at work in your community. If you’ve got a photo, share that with us, too.

More on Resilience Planning

President Obama is making the biggest commitment in American history to reduce carbon emissions and slow the impacts of climate change.

Real GDP growth in the second quarter was revised markedly upward, as consumers spent more and businesses invested more than previously estimated. The economy grew at a much faster pace in the second quarter than in the first, with strong personal consumption leading the rebound. To continue these strong underlying trends, the President is committed to: pushing Congress to increase investments in infrastructure as part of a long-term transportation reauthorization; opening our exports to new markets with new high-standards free trade agreements; and ensuring that neither fiscal brinksmanship nor the sequester returns in the next fiscal year, as outlined in the President’s FY2016 Budget.

FIVE KEY POINTS IN TODAY'S REPORT FROM THE BUREAU OF ECONOMIC ANALYSIS (BEA)

1. Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose 3.7 percent at an annual rate in the second quarter according to the BEA’s latest estimate, well above the first quarter’s 0.6 percent pace and the BEA’s initial second-quarter estimate of 2.3 percent growth. In the second quarter, the increase in GDP growth was led by a faster pace of personal consumption growth than in the first quarter and a shift from negative to positive net export growth. Structures investment, which declined sharply in the first quarter and was previously thought to have declined in the second, is now estimated to have grown. Overall, real GDP has now risen 2.7 percent over the past four quarters. Gross Domestic Output (GDO)—an alternative gauge of economic output that is potentially more accurate (though not predictably stronger or weaker) over the long term, which BEA calls “the average of GDP and Gross Domestic Income (GDI)”—has risen 2.5 percent over the past four quarters.

2. The 1.4 percentage point upward revision to real second-quarter GDP was spread across many components of economic output. Business fixed investment accounted for a little more than a third of the overall revision, as investment in structures, equipment, and intellectual property were all higher than previously estimated. Indeed, business investment—weighed down by reduced oil-related investment in the wake of oil price declines and previously thought to have fallen—is now estimated to have grown in the second quarter. State and local government purchases also accounted for 0.3 percentage point of the overall revision, as did inventory investment. Personal consumption, net exports, and federal government spending also each saw small positive upward revisions. Notably, this was an especially broad-based revision without any downward revisions in major components of GDP.

3. Initial estimates of Gross Domestic Output (GDO) growth over the long term tend to predict subsequent revisions to GDP growth. GDO is the Council of Economic Advisers’ term for the average of GDP and Gross Domestic Income (GDI)—two measures that should conceptually be identical but differ due to measurement error. While not systematically stronger or weaker than GDP over time, GDO can provide a more accurate picture of economic output, in part because independent errors to GDP and GDI tend partially to cancel out when the two are added. In addition, early GDO estimates appear to provide information about the extent to which GDP will eventually be revised. When GDO is estimated to grow faster than GDP, GDP tends to be revised up, and vice versa. The chart below shows the association between revisions to GDP growth incorporating all annual revisions to date (the “years later” measure) and the gap between initially estimated GDP and GDO. Of course—as with virtually all economic data when there are noisy statistics—it is important to focus on longer-term trends. Our analysis here is based on four-quarter growth rates of GDP and GDO, and we caution against focusing too much on the quarterly gap.

4. A slowdown in business investment during the recovery has been led by oil-driven declines in structures and equipment spending, while intellectual property investment — including research and development—has accelerated throughout the recovery. Structures and equipment investment grew markedly more slowly over the first half of 2015 than they had earlier in the recovery, largely reflecting reduced oil investment in the low-price environment. These components have restrained overall business investment growth. But at the same time, investment in intellectual property, which chiefly comprises research and development and software, has grown progressively faster. In fact, research and development investment has grown 7.9 percent over the past four quarters, the fastest pace since 2007 and three times faster than overall economic growth. The acceleration in overall IP spending has been relatively steady throughout the recovery, while equipment and structures investment have introduced considerable volatility. Many economists view IP investment — and research and development in particular—as an important source of productivity growth.

5. Real private domestic final purchases (PDFP)—the sum of consumption and fixed investment—rose 3.3 percent at an annual rate in the second quarter, and is growing at a faster year-over-year pace than overall GDP. Real PDFP—which excludes noisy components like net exports, inventories, and government spending—is generally a more reliable measure of next-quarter GDP growth than current GDP. While GDO aims to measure output growth more accurately in a given quarter by reducing measurement error, PDFP aims to measure signals of future economic growth by eliminating some of the noise in GDP. Over the past four quarters, PDFP grew by 3.4 percent, a faster rate than overall GDP growth. In analogy to the relationship between GDP and PDFP, the sum of wages and corporate profits is an especially important component of Gross Domestic Income (GDI), the income-side output measure that is combined with GDP to produce GDO. In fact, while PDFP tends to predict next-quarter GDP especially well, wages and profits tend to predict GDP over the next four quarters especially well—despite being more volatile than PDFP. Real wages and profits have grown 2.6 percent over the past four quarters, roughly in line with current trends in GDP and GDO.

As the Administration stresses every quarter, GDP figures can be volatile and are subject to substantial revision. Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one single report, and it is informative to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available.

As the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, it’s my job to oversee the implementation and enforcement of the President’s priorities across the Administration.

You might call us the nerve center where goals become initiatives, and initiatives become programs at work on the ground in local communities and states across the country.

With that in mind, let’s go back to basics for a second and focus on something we can all agree on:

Any plans that we want to make for improving communities across the country need to be hatched in partnership with those communities — by the people who live in them, work in them, and stand to benefit from them.

This week marks ten years since the neighborhoods of New Orleans were left devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Since then, community partnerships with the federal government have helped revitalize those communities. They’ve made sure the city’s vital health clinic system stays funded and delivering high quality services. They’ve laid the groundwork to open the Loyola Avenue-Union Passenger Terminal Streetcar Line in the city’s business district. They’ve brought the number of homeless veterans in New Orleans to a functional zero by December of 2014 – more than a year ahead of the proposed goal. (Hear straight from a New Orleanian about the role open data played in the city's transformation.)

There are projects like these at work across the country, whether you realized it or not.

Over the course of the past six years, this Administration has been steadily creating programs in partnership with the communities they intend to serve – from southeastern Kentucky to Fresno to Detroit.

While there are a lot of things we have been up to from addressing climate change to poverty alleviation, we are taking a new approach — one that relies on communities developing plans that best fit their needs rather than the laundry list of programs the government has. It’s pretty simple. First, we partner with communities by seeking out their plans or vision. Second, we take a one-government approach that crosses agency and program silos to support communities in implementing their plans for improvement. Finally we focus on what works, using data to measure success and monitor progress.

 

We wanted to give the American public a sense of exactly what that looks like – and give you the opportunity to take a look at what’s at work in your area. So today, we released a snapshot view of the Obama administration’s community-based initiatives. It combines datasets from initiatives across more than 15 Federal agencies – and we’re adding datasets and features as we continue building it.

Take a look – see what’s at work in your area.

Then, share how you’ve seen these programs at work in your community. If you’ve got a photo, share that with us, too.

From the start, this map has been built in the open, and source code is available on GitHub. We want to know what you think, and how we can improve it – so share your thoughts with us here.