How the Army Corps Is Swindling Americans

By Michael Grunwald, Grist.org. Posted April 2, 2008.

For more environmental news and humor, sign up for Grist's e-mail list.

Imagine the Pentagon had been caught red-handed concocting its justification before launching the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Imagine that after the scandal died down, the Pentagon admitted Saddam didn't really have WMDs -- but proposed an even larger invasion, because there was a remote possibility things might change someday. Then imagine Congress had rewarded this logic with overwhelming bipartisan support.

It's a silly thought experiment, because Congress -- for all its flaws -- takes war at least somewhat seriously. But there's still one part of the Pentagon that can count on overwhelming bipartisan support no matter what it proposes. 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.

The upper Mississippi scandal was the start of my morbid fascination with the corps and its enablers in Congress. I was a Washington Post reporter then, and I had stumbled into America's bumbling water resources agency after hearing that it was spending billions of dollars damming and dredging rivers with little barge traffic. Soon leakers were sending me a stream of hilarious internal corps memos about "getting creative" with economic analyses in order to "grow the program" with ginned-up projects. I remember my editor saying the corps bureaucracy reminded him of covering communist Czechoslovakia. And I remember thinking -- after independent investigations by the Government Accountability Office, the National Academy of Sciences, and even the Pentagon inspector general confirmed that the corps was an unholy mess -- that since the mess had become public, it would have to be cleaned up.

I thought wrong. 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.

Situation Normal: All Porked Up

My first corps story was about the Red River, where the agency had spent $2 billion building dams (named after Louisiana congressmen) to create a liquid highway (named after a Louisiana senator) for barges that never came. My second was about the Missouri River, where the corps was flouting the Endangered Species Act to maintain a reliable waterway for barges that rarely came. And with that I figured I had given more than enough attention to an obscure public works agency with an addiction to concrete.

Then I got a pile of documents from a corps economist named Don Sweeney.

In 1993, the corps had begun a $60 million study of navigation improvements on the upper Mississippi, its largest study ever. Sweeney was tapped to lead the study team. His task was to calculate whether the economic benefits that private shipping interests would receive from larger locks would exceed the costs to the public. If so, the corps would recommend the project, and Congress would approve it.

Sweeney knew the corps tended to overestimate the need for giant navigation projects with powerful congressional sponsors. The agency had predicted 27 million tons of barge traffic for the first year of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, 25 million tons too high. He realized the corps was using a hopelessly primitive economics model that assumed shippers would use barges at any cost. So he developed a more sophisticated model that was hailed inside and outside the corps as a supermodel. And in 1998, he concluded there was no need to spend a billion dollars on larger locks; the river's occasional barge delays could be eased with decent scheduling.

See more stories tagged with: water, army corps, mississippi river, missouri river, illinois river, wetlands, hurricane katrina, new orleans

Michael Grunwald is a senior correspondent for Time Magazine and the author of The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Water! Sign up now »