Presidents and Congress like to dance the Potomac two-step with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ budget. White House lowballs the number and Congress boosts it. It’s a gimmick that enables administrations to make deficits appear smaller than they actually are. But there is another major problem with this approach. Everything in the President’s Budget Request has an accompanying budget justification sheet that includes original budget-cost ratio, remaining budget-cost ratio (as a project gets closer to completion, remaining costs decrease, generally improving the BCR), nonfederal contribution and other details about the project. We don’t get that information on funding added by Congress.

Taxpayers for Common Sense has long argued for reforms to the Corps and creation of a prioritization systems. Gimmicks like this don’t help.

What will help is that the administration proposes a new user fee (in addition to the existing fuel tax, most likely in the form of per commercial vessel charge) that will generate $1.7 billion in additional revenue to meet not only construction needs but finance 10 percent of Operations and Maintenance costs. While that seems like a small amount, inland waterway users currently contribute nothing to O&M and the total federal subsidy to the system is estimated to be 90 percent.