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Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and
Risk Management
Crisis and Emergency Management
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NOTICE: The ICDRM's monthly emergency managment forum, held at the GWU |
| February
2003
Volume 4 - Number 1 |
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Links:
Current events
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The US Army Corps of Engineering
By Falah Al-Mahan
The Army Corps of Engineers is a federal agency that employs 35,000 people and plays many national roles and functions within the DoD. Its formal duty is, designing and managing the construction of military facilities for many Defense agencies including the Army and Air Force. In the other hand, its public responsibility includes planning, designing, building and operating water resources-related and other civil/public works projects and facilities. The Agency’s past and present impact has been quite significant; both as a result of its civil works and its National Defense work projects. Unfortunately, from public perspective, that impact has been overwhelmingly viewed in negative terms because of the Corps’ continuing attempts to aggressively push large and costly construction projects in order to secure its budget increases. There were some series of investigative reports by The Washington Post published over the periods of 2000-2002, examining extensive Corps river channeling efforts made along the Missouri River and elsewhere based on lofty barge traffic projections that never materialized. The Washington Post reports revealed that the military commanders of the Corps launched a detailed, behind-the-scenes campaign (“Program Growth Initiative”) to gain $4 billion civil works budget without the knowledge of the civilian Assistant Army Secretary to whom the Corps directly reports. It was farther found that the agency is “converting its strong congressional relationships into billions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer-funded water projects, many with significant environmental costs and minimal economic benefits” and pointed to 6 particularly controversial projects. It also found that the Corps wetlands regulatory program was “mostly just a ‘permitting’ program, approving well over 99% of developers requests to drain, dredge and fill wetlands, consistently finding that even sensitive projects would have negligible impacts.” In addition to these reports, a Pentagon investigation concluded that 3 top officials of the Corps did in fact manipulate an economic study in an effort to justify a $1 billion set of projects. The report goes further, challenging the overall ability of the Corps to conduct honest analyses of projects it hopes to build. Several factors that attributed to these problems are: the Corps projects offer Congressmen jobs, contracts and other benefits for their constituents therefore, projects money is approved by congress easily. Another factor is that Corps while reporting on paper to a politically appointed Assistant Secretary of the Army, it effectively has answered only to Congress. Third factor is that Corps project evaluations are handled internally, without any routine outside review or approval. As a result of these events, many efforts of reforms have been introduced but the approvals were difficult. Some of these reforms important suggested that the Corps would be formally held accountable to the administration’s appointees in the Pentagon, Military commanders would be compelled to share information with their civilian bosses, The Corps would be barred from lobbying Congress without administration approval, and the appointed Assistant Army Secretary for Civil Works would have the final say on Corps decisions. For More Information, Please visit the following: http://www.senate.gov/~grassley/releases/2000/p0r3--1.htm http://www.taxpayer.net/corpswatch/LearnMore/scandals.htm http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A25026-2000Feb23¬Found=true http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A47092-2000Feb13¬Found=true |