Gov. Bobby Jindal, along with governors from around the U.S., met with President-elect Barack Obama and his team in Philadelphia Tuesday.

The meeting covered a variety of issues facing individual states, and the nation.

"This is the first time ever that a president-elect has met with the nation's governors. I want to commend them for doing that, especially during these difficult times. They made it very clear, they're interested in reaching across party lines, and they generally listened," Jindal said.

And that's what it mostly was -- a chance for Obama to hear the governors’ concerns.

Obama did speak out about the struggling economy, and suggested the governors could help with a solution.

"As president, I'm not simply asking for governors implement an economic plan. I'm going to be interested in you actually helping draft and shape that economic plan," Obama said.

After the nearly two hour meeting, Jindal says he met privately with Obama for a few minutes. There, he stressed the importance of overhauling FEMA, something governors from Iowa and Texas backed him up on.

They're states, like Louisiana, who are still cutting through layer after layer of red tape to get disaster recovery money.

Jindal says, more than 3 years after Katrina, it is crucial for the feds to free up some of the money already approved for Louisiana. He used the Charity Hospital situation as an example.

"You know, historically, FEMA has been offering the state now for the last couple of years roughly $32 million. The state's estimates are that the true damage is close to $492 million,” Jindal said

“You multiply the same kind of disagreement across hundreds of projects and you see what is slowing down the flow of billions of dollars of federal recovery assistance that's already been approved by Congress."

Jindal says it also slows projects in New Orleans to rebuild police and fire stations -- setbacks he blames on federal bureaucracy.

But much of this could be avoided down the road Jindal says, if the feds would fully commit to coastal restoration and hurricane protection across south Louisiana.

"We've had four very strong storms in three years -- very expensive storms. What's clear to me is it's much more effective to pay on the front end for protection, than it is to pay on the back end for evacuation and property replacement," he said. “Whether it's speeding up our offshore revenues, whether it's providing additional federal dollars for projects that have already been approved, let's remind ourselves, 2011 is a good first step, but that's not the comprehensive protection we need. That's only the first step, that only gets us to 100-year flood protection. That doesn't fund comprehensive coastal restoration. That doesn't fund category 5 protection. That doesn't do some of the other things we need done as well.”