Hidden throughout the bill are pounds and pounds of water pork that penalize taxpayers so members of Congress can win political points. Today the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee will mark up S. 507, the Water Resources Development Act of 1999. Contingent authorization will pressure the Corps to skip the review process and to approve projects that are economically unfeasible.
Many Projects are out of date.
One project has not been updated for over 30 years. The bill would authorize the Corps to begin designing expansions of several Upper Mississippi Locks, despite the fact that the Corps own preliminary studies show this project to be economically unfeasible. The new bill proposes billions of dollars in new spending on projects that may never be appropriated. The bill exempts several projects from contributing local money for construction and operational costs for local projects. In 1986, Congress enacted reforms so that projects would be authorized only when all of their studies were done and when local beneficiaries were willing to pay a fair share of the cost.