Dear Senator:

On behalf of the nearly one million members of our organizations, we write in strong opposition to the Senate version of the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) of 2007. This bill ignores years of accumulated evidence that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is sorely in need of fiscal reform. As currently drafted, this bill (S. 1248) will add tens of billions of dollars in new projects, exempt projects from cost-sharing, and fail to prioritize the most critical projects from a backlog loaded with dead wood. Hurricane Katrina taught the country painful and expensive lessons about the antiquated, politicized approaches to water resource projects. We urge you to oppose WRDA and support the McCain-Feingold prioritization amendment and the DeMint project backlog reduction amendment, as well as other amendments that may be offered to reform the Corps. Our organizations will consider votes on the Water Resources Development Act in our end-of-year scorecards.

The WRDA legislation as it is now written is unacceptable to American taxpayers. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill costs approximately $31.5 billion. Although we understand there are efforts to cut the bill’s total cost to $16 billion, this is still an enormous price tag for American taxpayers. In addition, the bill provides approximately $1.8 billion for new locks on the Upper Mississippi River, along with nearly $1.6 billion in environmental restoration projects on the same stretch of river. All told, more than $3.5 billion is in the bill for Upper Mississippi River projects alone. One provision, Sec. 1003(o), would avoid the normal Congressional authorization process to accelerate billions of dollars worth of Louisiana projects that have yet to be designed. Sec. 2001 will provide local cost-share credit for potentially decades-old work in project areas, essentially forcing more of the cost-share burden onto federal taxpayers. Commenting on a far less sweeping House version of this provision, the Office of Management and Budget estimated the provision “would potentially add billions of dollars in Federal costs.” Sec. 2039 shifts project cost increases over 20% wholly onto the federal taxpayer, essentially removing incentives to the Corps and local sponsors to control costs. These costs are currently shared at the existing project rate.

The McCain-Feingold prioritization amendment will establish a commission appointed by the Administration and Congress to recommend a project prioritization system and initially assign projects by type (flood control, navigation, etc.) into broad priority tiers. These priority listings would only be advisory and Congress would decide the form and disposition of future prioritization systems.

The DeMint deauthorization provision would close loopholes in the existing automatic deauthorization process to ensure that moribund projects that have not received construction funding for six and a half years would be weeded out of the $58 billion backlog that is crushing the civil works program. This will reduce the scope and scale of projects to a manageable level and, when coupled with prioritization, will establish a transparent process that will provide a better chance for the most worthy projects to be completed in a cost-effective and timely manner. We urge you to support the McCain-Feingold and DeMint amendments.

Furthermore, it is irresponsible that even after the budget-busting score from CBO, it seems the bill managers are doing little to cut spending. Instead, they are quickly rewriting the legislation before moving it to the floor for passage with initial reports indicating that only section 1003(o) will be affected. Bringing up a heretofore unseen bill authorizing billions of dollars in projects undercuts Senate leadership commitments to transparency and openness. Senators will not even know what is in the bill that they are voting on.

Again, we urge you to oppose the Senate version of the Water Resources Development Act of 2007 and to support amendments to reform the Corps. We will consider votes on the Water Resources Development Act in our end of year scorecards.

If you would like to discuss this issue further please contact Steve Ellis, Taxpayers for Common Sense Action at 202-546-8500 ext. 126 (steve@taxpayer.net) or Kristina Rasmussen, National Taxpayers Union at 703-683-5700 or David Williams, Council for Citizens Against Government Waste at 202-467-5300.

Sincerely,

Ryan Alexander
President
Taxpayers for Common Sense Action

John Berthoud
President
National Taxpayers Union

Thomas Schatz
President
Council for Citizens Against Government Waste