The Army Corps of Engineers is a curious beast.
On the one hand, there’s its heritage — the gung ho combat engineers who would be out there in bulldozers building air strips on coral atolls even while shells fell about them.
Beyond that, there’s the large number of useful, productive, critical infrastructure activities that the ACoE has done. A lot of that’s flood control — I drive past Chatfield dam and reservoir every day on the way to work, and the bright red ACoE sign with the little castle logo reminds of the good things the Corps has done.
By the same token, the ACoE is in the business of doing things. What things it does are often driven more by political reasons than for sound engineering or scientific reasons.
Thus, my reluctance to immediately blast the Bush Administration over the “Bush stole money from the ACoE levee repair program to pay for the War in Iraq” accusation. Because not only did I know that the Corps asks for tons of money for various projects that are never actually funded, war or no war, but because a lot of money that the Corps does get is spent on … less laudable projects.
Before Hurricane Katrina breached a levee on the New Orleans Industrial Canal, the Army Corps of Engineers had already launched a $748 million construction project at that very location. But the project had nothing to do with flood control. The Corps was building a huge new lock for the canal, an effort to accommodate steadily increasing barge traffic.
Except that barge traffic on the canal has been steadily decreasing
In Katrina’s wake, Louisiana politicians and other critics have complained about paltry funding for the Army Corps in general and Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five years of President Bush’s administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large.
Much of that Louisiana money was spent to try to keep low-lying New Orleans dry. But hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated water projects demanded by the state’s congressional delegation and approved by the Corps, often after economic analyses that turned out to be inaccurate. Despite a series of independent investigations criticizing Army Corps construction projects as wasteful pork-barrel spending, Louisiana’s representatives have kept bringing home the bacon.
For example, after a $194 million deepening project for the Port of Iberia flunked a Corps cost-benefit analysis, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) tucked language into an emergency Iraq spending bill ordering the agency to redo its calculations. The Corps also spends tens of millions of dollars a year dredging little-used waterways such as the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the Atchafalaya River and the Red River — now known as the J. Bennett Johnston Waterway, in honor of the project’s congressional godfather — for barge traffic that is less than forecast.
The Industrial Canal lock is one of the agency’s most controversial projects, sued by residents of a New Orleans low-income black neighborhood and cited by an alliance of environmentalists and taxpayer advocates as the fifth-worst current Corps boondoggle.
One unfortunate result of Katrina is that we can expect still more projects of this sort.
Yesterday, congressional defenders of the Corps said they hoped the fallout from Hurricane Katrina would pave the way for billions of dollars of additional spending on water projects. Steve Ellis, a Corps critic with Taxpayers for Common Sense, called their push “the legislative equivalent of looting.”
The article even notes that the Bush Administration moves on flood protection in Louisiana weren’t quite as unalloyedly dimwitted as they’ve been portrayed to be.
Louisiana’s politicians have requested much more money for New Orleans hurricane protection than the Bush administration has proposed or Congress has provided. In the last budget bill, Louisiana’s delegation requested $27.1 million for shoring up levees around Lake Pontchartrain, the full amount the Corps had declared as its “project capability.” Bush suggested $3.9 million, and Congress agreed to spend $5.7 million.
Administration officials also dramatically scaled back a long-term project to restore Louisiana’s disappearing coastal marshes, which once provided a measure of natural hurricane protection for New Orleans. They ordered the Corps to stop work on a $14 billion plan, and devise a $2 billion plan instead.
But overall, the Bush administration’s funding requests for the key New Orleans flood-control projects for the past five years were slightly higher than the Clinton administration’s for its past five years. Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the chief of the Corps, has said that in any event, more money would not have prevented the drowning of the city, since its levees were designed to protect against a Category 3 storm, and the levees that failed were already completed projects. Strock has also said that the marsh-restoration project would not have done much to diminish Katrina’s storm surge, which passed east of the coastal wetlands.
Part of the problem is that the ACoE has become, in many cases, the easiest way besides the Dept. of Transportation for Congress to show its constituents that money is being spent on them.
Overall, Army Corps funding has remained relatively constant for decades, despite the “Program Growth Initiative” launched by agency generals in 1999 without telling their civilian bosses in the Clinton administration. The Bush administration has proposed cuts in the Corps budget, and has tried to shift the agency’s emphasis from new construction to overdue maintenance. But most of those proposals have died quietly on Capitol Hill, and the administration has not fought too hard to revive them.
In fact, more than any other federal agency, the Corps is controlled by Congress; its $4.7 billion civil works budget consists almost entirely of “earmarks” inserted by individual legislators. The Corps must determine that the economic benefits of its projects exceed the costs, but marginal projects such as the Port of Iberia deepening — which squeaked by with a 1.03 benefit-cost ratio — are as eligible for funding as the New Orleans levees.
“It has been explicit national policy not to set priorities, but instead to build any flood control or barge project if the Corps decides the benefits exceed the costs by 1 cent,” said Tim Searchinger, a senior attorney at Environmental Defense. “Saving New Orleans gets no more emphasis than draining wetlands to grow corn and soybeans.”
So long as the Corps’s focus (or the focus of those who fund it) remains on how to spend money, rather than explicit types of projects prioritized solely by who looks good in the next elections (and what benefits contributors), underfunding of “worthy” projects such as levees and so forth will remain a problem.
Obligatory Disclaimer: My company works as a contractor for the ACoE on various projects — all of them, to my knowledge, good and socially beneficial ones having to do with environmental clean-up.