Army Corps of Dysfunction

"In 2000, the Army Corps of Engineers was caught red-handed concocting its justification before launching a $1 billion project on the upper Mississippi River system. After the scandal died down, the corps admitted there wasn't really enough barge traffic to justify construction -- but proposed a $4 billion project, because there was a remote possibility things might change someday. And yes, the project recently sailed through a united Congress, where water projects are a time-honored form of political currency that steer jobs and money to the constituents and contributors of powerful members."

"By corps standards, pouring thousands of tons of concrete into the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers to relieve nonexistent barge congestion with seven new locks is no environmental disaster; those rivers are already highly engineered and degraded. But it is a stark example of the dysfunction of the corps -- its dishonest analyses, anachronistic priorities, predilection for makework, and desperation to please its congressional patrons and special-interest clients. And that dysfunction is itself an environmental disaster -- not only because some of the porky boondoggles it produces destroy pristine rivers and enormous swaths of wetlands, but because an honest corps with better priorities could help revive America's ravaged ecosystems."

"Since 2000, corps leaders have repeatedly promised more environmental sensitivity and better economic analyses. But they keep rubber-stamping the same wasteful and destructive pork that soured their reputations in the first place. As I have written in Grist, the dysfunction of the corps and America's water resources system drowned the city of New Orleans and killed more than 1,000 people in 2005. And not even that catastrophe has prompted change. So I was pretty naïve to expect the debacle on the upper Mississippi to lead to reform."