By Staff
Whether it's five dead in a Minneapolis bridge collapse where the safety of the span has been suspect for years, the war in Iraq, the deplorable condition of New Orleans two Augusts after Hurricane Katrina or $1.1 billion in federal subsidies paid from 1999 to 2005 to estates of deceased farmers, great gobs of public money continue to be flushed away with insufficient accountability.
What kind of bang for the buck are American taxpayers getting in Iraq, where $37.4 billion in U.S. federal funding was appropriated for reconstruction? Aside from all the lives and treasure lost in warfare where no humvee or Bradley vehicle seems a match for a $10 pipe bomb, how are we doing?
Nearly a third of the population of Iraq – 8 million people – remain without water, sanitation, food and shelter.
The humanitarian crisis there has worsened since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
Classic pork barrel politics created the man-made calamity that drowned New Orleans. The Category 3 storm mostly missed the Big Easy in the bottom of a bowl.
"Heckuva job, Brownie" became shorthand for the bungling response of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), but Time magazine's Aug. 13 cover story finds FEMA a scapegoat and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers the "real culprit" and symbol of a "sinister" system.
The effort to protect coastal Louisiana from storms and to restore its wetlands vanishing at the rate of a football field nearly every half hour is compared to the scope of the moon mission. Although the Corps spends more in Louisiana than in any other state, too much goes for wasteful, destructive pork.
Michael Brown's departure from FEMA made front-page news, but Corps commander Carl Strock's resignation eight months later drew little attention.
Almost all of the $7 billion the Corps received since Katrina goes to traditional engineering: huge levees designed to control nature rather than preserve it. Some call the plan the Great Wall of Louisiana. Congress is about to authorize the first 72-mile stretch for $900 million. New Orleans wasn't on the coast originally, but the Gulf has advanced 20 miles inland.
Congress let the Corps seize control of the entire Mississippi River and its tributaries in an unprecedented big government project that foreshadowed the New Deal.
The Corps built dams, floodways and levees throughout the basin, creating the equivalent of a liquid highway system, but walling off the river and trapping sediments choked off the natural land-building process that offset erosion.
While New Orleans sinks, 30 percent of coastal wetlands have slid into the Gulf, endangering U.S. offshore oil and gas fields, a lucrative seafood industry, ports and 2 million people.
We'd be at war if Mexico swiped that much land.
While the city's main hurricane project fell 37 years behind schedule, Louisiana's congressional delegation – you might have heard of Democrat William Jefferson, indicted on corruption charges for keeping cash in his freezer, and Republican David Vitter, embroiled in a prostitution scandal – steered Corps funds into projects with nothing to do with flood protection. It's clear from Time's reporting that rather than just reflect the will of the nation, the Corps shapes it, with the result that the point of too many projects is to keep its 35,000 employees busy.
The Government Accountability Office, the National Academies of Science and the Pentagon inspector general documented the agency's bias.
In 2000, its leaders were caught cooking an economic analysis to justify a $ billion upper Mississippi River project.
The Corps is funded almost exclusively by earmarks, those bacon slices members of Congress bring home to prove they're working. Water is a national security issue, but we have no policy, only a ready-to-build agency whose agenda is driven by an annual funding frenzy presided over by 535 congressional bosses. Welcome to another classic example of the iron triangle, where commercial interests lobby the Corps and its congressmen for projects that make work for the Corps and provide Congress enablers with political cover and help lawmakers steer jobs and money to constituents and contributors.
Katrina didn't change the system, it provided an opening.
Sens. Vitter and Mary Landrieu promptly introduced a bloated quarter-trillion dollar Louisiana reconstruction bill drafted by lobbyists for oil, shipping and other corporate interests, including $40 billion for the Corps – 10 times its budget for the rest of the nation, including a port deepening that flunked its cost-benefit tests.
This system will lead us to the bottom of the sea before it lands us on the moon unless taxpayers demand accountability.