Our Take

Digging Deeper at the Corps

Aug 4, 2021 | 3 min read | Print Article

The BIF carries on a Congressional tradition of throwing cash at the Civil Works division of the Army Corps of Engineers. Tasked primarily with constructing and maintaining projects to provide navigable waterways, flood control, and “environmental restoration” (often to mitigate damage caused by previous Corps projects), the agency is quite popular with Congress. Big, expensive projects that lend themselves to ribbon cuttings delivered by men and women in uniform? Congress can’t get enough. They routinely appropriate billions more than the president (be he Republican or Democrat) requests.

The infrastructure package includes more than $17 billion in funds for Corps Civil Works. This is in addition to the $8.5 billion the Corps is likely to receive in the FY2022 “regular” appropriations. A bill the House just passed on July 29th. The bill directs more than four times the typical amount appropriated for construction, matches annual operations and maintenance, and would septuple the Flood Control and Coastal Emergencies account.

	BIF Bill	FY20 Approps	FY21 Approps	FY22 E&W
Investigation	$150,000,000	$151,000,000	$153,000,000	$155,000,000
Construction	$11,615,000,000	$2,681,000,000	$2,692,645,000	$2,591,732,000
MR&T	$808,000,000	$375,000,000	$380,000,000	$370,000,000
O&M	$4,000,000,000	$3,790,000,000	$3,838,000,000	$4,817,000,000
Regulatory Program	$160,000,000	$210,000,000	$210,000,000	$212,000,000
FURS	–	$200,000,000	$250,000,000	$250,000,000
Flood Control and Coastal Emergencies	$251,000,000	$35,000,000	$35,000,000	$35,000,000
Expenses	$40,000,000	$203,000,000	$206,000,000	$206,000,000
Office of Asst Sec		$5,000,000	$5,000,000	$5,000,000
	$17,024,000,000	$7,650,000,000	$7,769,645,000	$8,641,732,000

Directing a mountain of cash is apparently not enough. The bill also waives most provisions designed to rein in the costs of projects including cost-share responsibilities normally associated with these projects. Corps Civil Works projects often require a non-federal sponsor (port authority, state, local government, inland barge operators) to pony up a share of the cost for construction. This responsibility, which ranges from 50 percent to as little as 15, was put into place to stretch federal dollars farther to get more and better projects constructed. As seen in many an expense account, or kids with a parent’s credit card, people tend to make more conservative choices when it comes to spending their own money as opposed to that from somebody else.

Notable bailouts of cost-share responsibility:

Blanket waiver of Sec. 902 restriction – normally requires Congress to explicitly authorize additional spending on a project that is more than 20 percent over budget. Eliminated for all projects funded by the BIF money.
Barge Operator Bailout – $2.5 billion in construction funds for the Inland Waterways System with $0 contribution from the Inland Waterways Trust Fund which is supposed to cover 50 percent of construction costs. This will cause federal dollars to be spent on numerous money-losing waterways that the inland shipping industry refuses to fund itself.