Par for the Corps

So the United States doesn't really have a water resources policy; just a pork-barrel water resources agency that builds pet projects in congressional districts across the country.

But the pressure goes both ways. The Corps motto is " Essayons ," French for "Let us try," and its leaders have always pushed Congress to let them improve on nature's work. Even in the pre-Earth Day era, executive-branch officials complained that Corps leaders exploited their Capitol Hill connections to secure funding for projects that served their clients in the shipping, dredging, farming and building industries. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's interior secretary excoriated the "reckless and wastrel behavior" of the "insubordinate and self-seeking" Corps, attributing its popularity to "the torporific effect of the pork barrel." President Dwight D. Eisenhower declared that "I cannot overstate my opposition to this kind of waste of public funds."

All modern presidents have tried to rein in the Corps, but Congress has jealously protected it. In 2000, after I wrote about a secret "Program Growth Initiative" that Corps generals had devised to try to boost their budget, the Clinton administration was so embarrassed by the reaction of its assistant Army secretary for civil works -- "Oh my God. My God. I have no idea what you're talking about" -- that it announced a modest plan to reaffirm the Pentagon's authority over the Corps. A week later, after a ferocious backlash from congressional leaders, the plan was meekly withdrawn.

The Corps is allowed to endorse projects whenever it calculates that the economic benefits to private interests -- even one private interest -- would exceed the costs to taxpayers. And without executive-branch oversight, the Corps has traditionally inflated benefits, low-balled costs, and otherwise justified projects that keep its employees busy and its congressional patrons happy.

The Corps predicted its Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway would cost about $300 million and float 28 million tons of cargo in its first year; the actual totals were $2 billion and 1.4 million tons. And that was before the Program Growth Initiative ordered Corps analysts to "get creative" with economic studies.

The result was the kind of boondoggles that Larry Prather called "swine," such as the Yazoo Pump project, a plan to build the world's largest flood-control pump in the Mississippi Delta even though it would cost more than buying the soybean farms it is supposed to keep dry. Or the similarly destructive plan to build jetties to protect private fishing boats off North Carolina's Outer Banks, at a cost of about $500,000 per boat. Or a proposal to deepen the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to attract cargo ships that had no interest in using it.

The biggest Corps scandal of 2000 involved a $1.2 billion navigation project on the Mississippi River. The Corps economist studying it had concluded that the numbers didn't add up, so his bosses reassigned him and pressured his team to concoct a new economic justification. The Army inspector general later concluded not only that the Corps had skewed that analysis, but that it had a systemic bias in favor of big projects. Generals were reprimanded, the National Academy of Sciences urged more modest approaches and the Corps went back to the drawing board.

In December 2004, the Corps came back with its modest proposal: a $7.7 billion project.

Again and Again

Today's Corps leaders say their agency is more ecologically sensitive and fiscally sensible; in recent interviews, they promised "more credible" analyses. Bush has proposed zero funding for most of the zaniest Corps projects; he also shut down the Outer Banks debacle, and fired an assistant Army secretary who complained publicly about the proposed budget cuts. The deepening of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal seems dead, and the Corps has stopped dredging some of its little-used waterways.

For the most part, though, Congress has ignored Bush's proposed cuts. And the Corps still defends its clunkers, including a Delaware River deepening that was savaged by the GAO and a Columbia River deepening that was debunked by the Oregonian newspaper .

The Corps recently admitted in court that its bizarre Missouri flood-control project was justified by a basic math error, and a new study suggests that a multibillion-dollar Corps navigation project on the Ohio River will make the Mississippi project look cost-effective by comparison. The Corps is also struggling with its $10 billion effort to restore the Florida Everglades, the project that was supposed to turn around the agency's environmental reputation; one Corps manager complained in a 2005 memo that it's over budget and behind schedule, and that it isn't restoration at all.

"We continue to see the same systemic problems at the Corps, again and again, the same recurring themes," GAO analyst Anu Mittal said.