Katrina Victims: Justice is Coming

With billions of dollars about to be poured into infrastructure construction, the Army Corps will be allocated some $4.6 billion for flood protection and other water development projects—an amount almost equal to its annual budget (excluding emergency funding). About 10% will be directed to Louisiana. Senator Mary Landrieu is lobbying for more funds to protect Greater New Orleans from another catastrophic failure of federal levees that destroyed the region during Hurricane Katrina. http://blog.nola.com/ponchatoulatimes/2009/02/senate_economic_stimulus_packa.html

As much as the nation needs an economic stimulus, handing the Army Corps so much money—without insisting upon any reforms in the management of this grossly mismanaged agency—is a squandered opportunity. Cries for overhauling the Corps have largely fallen on deaf ears over the decades. Study after study has demonstrated that the Army Engineers are incompetent, inefficient, arrogant, disdainful of any independent peer review, and impervious to any meaningful oversight by the President and his Secretary of Defense.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal with supporters on election night Oct. 20, 2007

Sharp criticism of the Corps has now come from an unlikely source. Governor Bobby Jindal is a new darling of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. But even Jindal, who has been on the job for only a year, is frustrated with the hubris of the Corps’ hierarchy. In a recent interview, Jindal’s director of coastal activities, Garret Graves, expressed grave concern about the chronic failure to reform the Corps. Like the frustration expressed by former Governor Kathleen Blanco, the Jindal Administration is not a happy camper in its dealings with the bloated bureaucrats. Indeed, Graves predicted that the Corps of Engineers will not exist in the next twenty years “if it continues with this ridiculous bureaucracy.”

The economic stimulus package should serve as a stimulus for long overdue restructuring, refocusing, and reining in this fourth branch of government.