Dear Member of Congress:

For many years, our organizations have examined the standard operating practices of the Corps of Engineers and have worked to stop wasteful water projects. Beyond our criticisms of individual Corps projects, the incredible human and fiscal costs of Hurricane Katrina and other storms last year highlighted the critical need to modernize the nation’s approach to water resources.

The House of Representatives passed H.R. 2864, the Water Resources Development Act of 2005 in July of last year – before the shortcomings in our nation’s water resource programs became painfully obvious. To its credit, the Senate incorporated key reforms when they considered H.R. 2864 in July of this year. Specifically, the bill the Senate passed by voice vote included a truly independent system of peer review for costly, controversial, or critical projects. In addition, the Senate-passed bill includes provisions to set up a process to update and revise the 20-year old rules for evaluating and designing Corps projects, so as to incorporate modern science and economics. We urge you to push for the inclusion of these Katrina-related reforms in the final WRDA bill.

The impact of Hurricane Katrina taught us many things, including:

The Corps is not infallible and the country needs independent review of costly,controversial, or critical projects. Independent engineering panels have found that the major levee failures in New Orleans occurred because of faulty design, construction, or maintenance – not overtopping. Several independent analyses by the U.S. Army Inspector General, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Government Accountability Office have found serious flaws in Corps analysis and methodology. The Senate bill would establish a truly independent system to conduct peer review of costly, controversial, or critical Corps projects. The timing of the review is flexible, but the duration is strictly limited so as not delay the process. Reviewers will be able to consider all the data, facts, and models used – as well as the ultimate conclusion. Conversely, the review system envisioned by the House bill will be controlled by the Corps, and enables the Corps to ignore project complaints from the Governor of a directly-affected state as well as other involved agencies. Instead of wasting limited project funding on boondoggles, or worse, projects that are not designed soundly, the Corps should be meeting the nation’s water resource needs in a cost-effective manner, and truly independent peer review created in Sec. 2007 of the Senate-passed bill will help accomplish that.

We need to update the nation’s water resources playbook. Our nation continues to operate under rules promulgated in 1983 that ignore dramatic changes in transportation modes and operation, encourage development in flood prone areas, and ignore advances in scientific and economic thinking. Reports from independent agencies such as the Government Accountability Office, U.S. Army Inspector General, and National Academy of Sciences, have identified a tendency for the Corps to exaggerate project benefits, underestimate environmental costs, and favor large-scale structural projects to generate more work. Each of these agencies has called upon the Corps to reform its planning process. Sec. 2006 of the Senate-passed WRDA would establish a system to update the anachronistic rules that set the stage for the disaster in New Orleans.

The stakes are high. Since the 1920s, the Corps of Engineers has spent more than $122 billion on flood-control projects (adjusted for inflation), but average annual flood-control damages have tripled in real terms – even before Katrina. Hurricane Katrina took the lives of more than one thousand people, disrupted the lives of more than two million people, and destroyed tens of thousands of buildings. The cost to federal taxpayers alone will exceed $100 billion. WRDA 2006 is likely to exceed 400 pages, contain more than $15 billion in spending, and be weighed down by hundreds of wasteful water projects. We strongly Congress to support the taxpayer oriented provisions adopted by the Senate to incorporate strong modernization principles and independent peer review, and to reject attempts to undercut reform and maintain the status quo that served the nation so poorly in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

For more information, please contact Steve Ellis at Taxpayers for Common Sense, 202-546-8500 ext. 126 or steve taxpayer.net; Pete Sepp at National Taxpayers Union, 703-683-6700 or pressguy ntu.org; David Williams, Council for Citizens Against Government Waste, 202-467-5300 or dwilliams cagw.org.

Sincerely,

Jill Lancelot
President/Co-Founder
Taxpayers for Common Sense

John Berthoud
President
National Taxpayers Union Action

Thomas Schatz
President
Council for Citizens Against Government Waste