Washington ? A Senate inquiry into the government’s Hurricane Katrina failures ripped the Bush administration anew Thursday and urged the scrapping of the nation’s disaster response agency. But with a new hurricane season just weeks away, senators conceded that few if any of their proposals could become reality in time.

The bipartisan investigation into one of the worst natural disasters in the nation’s history singled out President Bush and the White House as appearing indifferent to the devastation until two days after the storm hit.

It said the Homeland Security Department either misunderstood federal disaster plans or refused to follow them. And it said New Orleans for years had neglected to prepare for large-scale emergencies.

“The suffering that continued in the days and weeks after the storm passed did not happen in a vacuum; instead, it continued longer that it should have because of – and was in some cases exacerbated by – the failure of government at all levels to plan, prepare for and respond aggressively to the storm,” concluded the report.

It was titled “Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared,” sober words for the future.

The Senate inquiry is the third major federal report on the government failures exposed by the Aug. 29 storm, which killed more than 1,300 people and which the Senate Budget Committee says has so far cost the federal government $103 billion.

The report follows similar inquiries by the House and White House and comes in an election year in which Democrats have pointed critically to the Katrina response.

The senators concluded that only by abolishing the Federal Emergency Management Agency – which Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, called a “bumbling bureaucracy” – and replacing it with a stronger authority could the government best respond to future catastrophes.

But the two lawmakers who led the inquiry, Collins and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said such an overhaul could not be completed by the June 1 start of the hurricane season.

“As a practical matter, that’s just five weeks away, and it’s not going to happen,” Collins said. “But that doesn’t mean that we should continue in the long term to operate with a system that’s failed, that is so clearly flawed.”