[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 31 (Thursday, March 19, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2243-S2244]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 THE CORPS OF ENGINEERS SWEEPSTAKES II

  Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, these remarks are the second in a series 
that I call ``The Corps of Engineers Sweepstakes.'' Two or 3 weeks ago 
I was on the floor to speak about a series of foot-dragging and 
irrational decisions on the part of the Corps of Engineers in an area 
that affects not only your State and mine, including its proposal to 
bury an archeological site on which a 9,000-year-old human skeleton had 
been found. Because of the wishy-washy answers on that subject from the 
corps, there is now included in the supplemental appropriations bill 
about to be discussed on this floor a prohibition against the corps 
destroying that archeological site.
  But the corps is at it again, another installment in the comedy of 
errors. The bureaucrats in the Army Corps of Engineers office in Walla 
Walla, WA, have taken it upon themselves to promote and publish a 
survey of public opinion on the removal of four dams on the lower Snake 
River. The corps right now, today, is in the process of distributing 
this survey to some 12,000 people. Sending out a survey to 12,000 
people to determine what they think about removing dams is one thing. 
But if you are the winner in this sweepstakes and get one of the 
surveys in the mail, out of the envelope drops a $2 bill. The corps is 
using $24,000 in taxpayers' money just to put $2 bills in the envelope 
that contains the survey.
  But that is not all. You get $2 for being the passive recipient of 
the survey. If you fill it out and send it back

[[Page S2244]]

to the Corps of Engineers, they will send you another $10. That is much 
better than the odds in any of the multitude of sweepstakes we receive 
that say you may be a winner if you send it in, with odds of 100 
billion to 1. Everybody gets the $2, and everybody who sends the survey 
in gets the additional $10. If they all answer, that is $144,000 of the 
taxpayers' money.
  Mr. President, both you and I are constantly on the backs of the 
corps to engage in constructive projects that really mean something for 
us. I am sure you have received the same reaction that I have, on a 
number of occasions, that ``We just don't have enough money to do that. 
You are going to have to appropriate more.'' Here is $144,000, plus the 
cost of the survey, designing it and totaling it up. That simply is a 
waste of money. Am I to believe that the Corps of Engineers is truly 
broke when it is littering mailboxes in my State with $2 bills and 
promises of more? Last night, when I was discussing this with a friend, 
he laughed and said that he had recently gotten a survey from Lexus 
about luxury automobiles. In dealing with automobiles that cost more 
than $35,000, Lexus promised that if you sent in the survey they would 
send you $1. Luxury automobiles, $1 per survey; the Corps of Engineers 
on removing dams, $12 per survey. This is just not the way in which to 
spend taxpayer money. This is not going to increase confidence in the 
way that our Government spends our money.
  This is such a totally outrageous use of the taxpayers' money that I 
cannot resist the temptation to make more than one set of remarks on 
the floor on the subject, so I can promise you, Mr. President, that I 
will be back next week to tell you what is in the survey. If you are 
shocked about free $2 bills and free $10 bills from your friendly 
neighborhood Corps of Engineers office, wait until you, as a Senator 
from Oregon, see the totally distorted way in which the corps seeks 
your views, completely stacked toward one set of answers to the 
questions rather than an objective survey. But that is for another 
time.
  For this morning, the sole remark is: Here is this Government agency, 
constantly crying poverty to us when we have constructive activities 
for it to engage in, dropping $2 bills in mailboxes across southeastern 
Washington, and maybe a part of Oregon, for all I know, and promising 
$10 more for 5 minutes' worth of work in filling out a phony survey.
  This is not the way we should be spending our taxpayers' money.

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