[StBernard] Par for the Corps

[Westley Annis]

Par for the Corps
A Flood of Bad Projects

By Michael Grunwald
Sunday, May 14, 2006; B01



In 2000, when I was writing a 50,000-word Washington Post series about
dysfunction at the Army Corps of Engineers, I highlighted a $65 million
flood-control project in Missouri as Exhibit A. Corps documents showed that
the project would drain more acres of wetlands than all U.S. developers do
in a typical year, but wouldn't stop flooding in the town it was meant to
protect. FEMA's director called it "a crazy idea"; the Fish and Wildlife
Service's regional director called it "absolutely ridiculous."

Six years later, the project hasn't changed -- except for its cost, which
has soared to $112 million. Larry Prather, chief of legislative management
for the Corps, privately described it in a 2002 e-mail as an "economic dud
with huge environmental consequences." Another Corps official called it "a
bad project. Period." But the Corps still wants to build it.

"Who can take this seriously?" Prather asked in his e-mail. That's a good
question to ask about the entire civil works program of the Corps.

It came up occasionally in 2000, when Pentagon investigators, the Government
Accountability Office and the National Academy of Sciences were documenting
the agency's ecologically disastrous, economically dubious, politically
inspired water projects.

Then the Corps failed to protect New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina,
despite spending more in Louisiana than in any other state. Last month, the
Corps commander acknowledged that his agency's "design failure" led to the
floodwall collapses that drowned New Orleans. So why isn't everyone asking
questions about the Corps and its patrons in Congress?

Somehow, America has concluded that the scandal of Katrina was the
government's response to the disaster, not the government's contribution to
the disaster. The Corps has eluded the public's outrage -- even though a
useless Corps shipping canal intensified Katrina's surge, even though poorly
designed Corps floodwalls collapsed just a few feet from an unnecessary $750
million Corps navigation project , even though the Corps had promoted
development in dangerously low-lying New Orleans floodplains and had helped
destroy the vast marshes that once provided the city's natural flood
protection.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency's failures didn't inundate a city,
kill 1,000 residents and inflict $100 billion in damages. Yet FEMA is
justifiably disgraced, while Congress keeps giving the Corps more money and
more power. A new 185-point Senate report on what went wrong during Katrina
waits until point No. 65 to mention the Corps "design and construction
deficiencies" that left New Orleans underwater. Meanwhile, a new
multibillion-dollar potpourri of Corps projects is nearing approval on
Capitol Hill.

That's because the Corps is an addiction for members of Congress, who use
its water projects to steer jobs and money to their constituents and
contributors. President Bush has opposed dozens of the most egregious
boondoggles, but Congress has kept funding them and the Corps has refused to
renounce them -- while New Orleans has remained vulnerable.

Even Prather, the agency's public representative on the Hill, complained in
that private e-mail that the Corps has sacrificed its credibility by
defending its indefensible projects -- he called them "swine" -- just as the
Catholic Church defended its wayward priests.

"We have no strategy for saving ourselves," he wrote. "Someone needs to be
supervising the Corps."

The Torporific Pork Barrel

The Corps is one of the oldest and oddest federal agencies.

It got its start as an engineering regiment during the Revolutionary War,
building fortifications at Bunker Hill. It is still run by Army officers,
and it still oversees military projects such as the reconstruction of Iraq.
But most of its 35,000 employees are now civilians working on civilian
projects -- deepening ports; replenishing beaches; draining wetlands for
agriculture and development; and taming rivers for barge traffic, flood
control and hydropower. Officially the Corps is a Pentagon agency, but it
functions like a congressional preserve; its civil works budget consists
almost entirely of earmarks requested by individual members of Congress and
endorsed by 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.

Themes such as unintended consequences, environmental destruction, shoddy
economics and selfish politics.

The same themes that drowned New Orleans.

A City Drowned

After Katrina, the Corps said that all of its failed floodwalls had been
overtopped by a hurricane too powerful for the Category 3 protection
authorized by Congress, while Bush's critics said the administration's
budget cuts had hamstrung the Corps.

Both were wrong. Katrina was no stronger than a Category 2 when it hit New
Orleans, and many Corps levees collapsed even though they were not
overtopped. Bush's proposed budget cuts were largely ignored, and were
mostly irrelevant to the city's flood protection. New Orleans was betrayed
by the Corps and its friends in Congress.

The Corps helped set the stage for the disaster decades ago by imprisoning
the Mississippi River behind giant levees. Those levees helped protect St.
Louis, Memphis and even New Orleans from river flooding, but they also
reduced the amount of silt the river carries to its delta, curtailing the
land-building process that creates marshes and swamps along the Louisiana
coast. Those wetlands serve as hurricane speed bumps -- in Katrina, levees
with natural buffers had much higher survival rates -- but they have been
vanishing at a rate of 24 square miles per year.

After Hurricane Betsy in 1965, the Corps also began building levees to
protect the city from the Gulf of Mexico, but its misguided plan led to even
more destruction during Katrina. The Corps put most of its levees around
undeveloped and highly vulnerable floodplains instead of focusing on
protection for existing developments -- partly because Corps cost-benefit
analyses did not consider the cost of human life or environmental
degradation, and partly because powerful developers owned swampland in those
vulnerable floodplains. Katrina destroyed many of the houses built on those
former swamplands.

The Louisiana delegation and the Corps also deserve blame for the
Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, an alternative shipping route to the Port of
New Orleans. The outlet was always popular with port officials and a few
shipping executives, but it destroyed more than 20,000 acres of wetlands,
created a "hurricane superhighway" into the city and never attracted much
traffic. Now computer models suggest it amplified Katrina's surge by two
feet.

And the outlet was only the most destructive of the pork projects the Corps
has been building in Louisiana when it should have been upgrading levees and
pursuing its plan to restore the state's coastal wetlands. In 2000, I
described how the Corps had spent $2 billion wrestling the wild Red River
into a slack-water barge channel that wasn't being used by any barges; four
of its dams had been named for Louisiana members of Congress, and the entire
channel had been named for former Louisiana senator J. Bennett Johnston (D).
The Corps was also spending $750 million to build a lock that was supposedly
needed to accommodate increasing barge traffic on the New Orleans Industrial
Canal -- even though barge traffic was steadily decreasing. The Corps spent
$1.9 billion in Louisiana in the five years before Katrina, more than it
spent in any other state. But all that money didn't keep New Orleans dry.

Ever since Katrina, independent engineers have been pointing out grave
problems with the Corps levee designs, and criticizing the agency for
building on unstable soils. In congressional testimony last month, Lt. Gen.
Carl A. Strock, the commander of the Corps, finally acknowledged "design
flaws." But his damning admission got nowhere near as much attention as
former FEMA director Michael Brown's e-mail about being a "fashion god."

Where's the Outrage?

So why aren't Americans angry? Because water resources policy is so boring?
Because they're counting on the Corps to protect New Orleans from the next
storm? Because they assume all the other Corps flood-control projects are
properly designed and constructed?

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) are pushing a
Corps reform bill that would require independent reviews of large projects,
but they aren't getting much traction. By contrast, 81 senators have urged
swift passage of a bill approving $12 billion in new Corps projects. And the
Louisiana delegation has tried to use Katrina to pour billions into
unrelated Corps pork, including a port-deepening project that even the Corps
concluded would return just 30 cents on every taxpayer dollar.

Meanwhile, the Corps is rebuilding its New Orleans levees to mere Category 3
levels.

Maybe Americans will get angry after the next disaster.

grunwaldmr at washpost.com

Michael Grunwald is a Washington Post staff writer.

C 2006 The Washington Post Company