An Agency of Unchecked Clout

Almost all modern presidents have clashed with the Corps--and the Corps has usually won. Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson and Nixon all considered reforms that went nowhere. In 1977, President Carter tried to kill a "hit list" of 19 water projects, an effort that not only failed, but permanently damaged his relationship with Congress. In 1986, President Reagan did force Congress to make local communities pay more for Corps projects, but only in exchange for a costly new round of projects. This spring, President Clinton's Army secretary, Louis Caldera, tried to reaffirm executive branch control of the Corps, only to withdraw his proposed reforms a week later after a Capitol Hill backlash.

Now another intense battle is raging over the Corps--over who should control the agency, whether it should grow or shrink, and how much it should shift its focus from construction projects that degrade the environment to restoration projects that clean up old damage. It may not be the sexiest of Beltway brawls, but it will have a dramatic effect on America.

Corps levees and floodwalls protect millions of homes, farms and businesses. Its coastal ports and barge channels carry 2 billion tons of freight annually. Its dams generate one-fourth of America's hydroelectric power. Its water recreation sites attract more visitors than the National Park Service's. Its land holdings would cover Vermont and New Hampshire.

But the Corps may have its greatest impact on nature. It quietly presides over many of the nation's hottest environmental issues, from oil drilling on Alaska's North Slope to dam removal on the Snake River to water wars on the Missouri River to restoration of Florida's Everglades. It is in the thick of furors over endangered species, endangered rivers, ocean dumping, beach erosion, agricultural pollution, floodplain sprawl. It cleans up industrial and nuclear waste. In its regulatory role, it approves thousands of private projects that destroy modest amounts of wetlands; in its construction role, it is pushing several public projects that could destroy huge amounts of wetlands. So the future direction of the Corps will help determine the future health of America's environment.

To conservationists, that is not a comforting thought. They know the Corps as a dredge-and-destroy agency that builds massive dams, dikes and levees, domesticating wild rivers into straight and narrow barge canals. Its leaders have pledged to reinvent the Corps as a "greener" organization, but they still battle traditional environmental agencies on almost every major issue. To many environmentalists, the Corps is still Public Enemy Number One, and almost all of its major projects are still greeted with environmental lawsuits.

"The Corps still doesn't get it," said Hartwig, whose Fish and Wildlife regional office is fighting the project in East Prairie.

"They still think they can defeat Mother Nature with brilliant engineering. They talk about the environment, but they don't really believe in it."Joseph Westphal, the Clinton appointee who oversees the Corps, argues that it is unfair to dwell on the past, on ancient boondoggles built under orders from Congress in eras oblivious to ecological concerns. The real story, he says, is that the Corps has begun to appreciate the value of flora and fauna, and that its spending on environmental programs has quadrupled since 1992. The modern Corps is planting trees, creating wetlands, even dismantling a few of its dams, dikes and levees. It is restoring some of the river bends and backwaters it once wiped out, chauffeuring salmon past the fish-pulverizing dams it once built, and preparing to lead a $7.8 billion effort to undo the damage it once inflicted upon the Everglades.

"I can't say there's as much progress as I'd like, but there's definitely progress, real progress," said Westphal, the assistant Army secretary for civil works.

Westphal, an amiable political science professor who once ran the congressional Sun Belt Caucus, is supposed to supervise the civil works program, but he has rarely intervened in Corps decisions. Even though the overwhelming majority of the agency's employees are civilians, military commanders run its 49 districts and divisions, where the real work gets done. And under Ballard, a three-star general who pounds out e-mails in capital letters, the Corps virtually declared independence from the Clinton administration.

So while the Corps is showing some signs of modernization, it is also marching ahead with a new round of old-style projects, from the world's largest water pump in the Mississippi Delta to the world's largest beach replenishment along the New Jersey coast, from a $641 million lock replacement in a New Orleans canal to a $377 million harbor deepening in Wilmington, N.C. Local interests propose the projects, and members of Congress ram them into law, but none of them could happen without the cooperation of the Corps.

The East Prairie project is particularly anachronistic, and not only because of its outsize impact on wetlands. Its main flood control protection is not for East Prairie, but for waterlogged farmland in a sparsely inhabited area called the New Madrid Floodway. It's called a floodway because in a serious Mississippi rise, the Corps is supposed to let the river overwhelm the entire 180-square-mile area to protect more populated river communities.

In other words, the Corps is now trying to provide flood protection for an area it may end up flooding on purpose.