[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 10579-10580]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 REFORMING THE ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Schrock). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer) is recognized for 5 
minutes.

[[Page 10580]]


  Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, my goal in Congress is to assure that 
the Federal Government is a better partner to State and local 
communities, especially in developing infrastructure.
  Through its construction of water projects, the Army Corps of 
Engineers has been a major player in this career throughout our 
Nation's history. Recently some have questioned the Corps' planning and 
construction process and its ability to economically and 
environmentally justify its projects.
  I have joined with other Members of Congress in calling for reform 
and modernization of the Corps of Engineers, including updating the 
principles and guidelines by which it operates, addressing and 
prioritizing the Corps' enormous project backlog, and developing a 
system of independent review.
  Perhaps most important, I think we need to examine the role that 
Congress itself plays in pushing through poorly conceived water 
resources projects.
  Last week, the General Accounting Office issued a document which 
illustrates why Corps reform is urgently needed, especially a new 
process for independent review of Corps projects. The GAO report 
specifically examined the Corps' economic justification for the 
Delaware River channel deepening project. It found ``miscalculations, 
invalid assumptions and outdated information'' led the Corps to 
overestimate the project benefits by over 300 percent. It found that 
the Corps had violated basic economic principles in its economic 
feasibility studies, projecting benefits of over $40 million a year, 
when, in fact, the GAO found the benefits would be approximately one-
third of that amount.
  According to the GAO, the Corps had ``misapplied commodity growth 
rate projections, miscalculated trade route distances, and continued to 
include benefits for some import and export traffic that has declined 
dramatically over the last decade.''
  One of the most egregious examples of bad economics in the report 
found that the Corps assumed the same one-way distance for each of 
several trade routes, including the distance from Pennsylvania to 
Australia, to South America, Europe and the Mediterranean.
  The Corps is supposed to have a system of controls in place to catch 
these errors. Unfortunately, the GAO report concluded that the Corps' 
quality control system was ``ineffective in identifying significant 
errors and analytical problems.''
  In order to restore the public confidence in the Corps, we need to 
ensure that other Corps projects around the country do not suffer from 
the same economic errors. It is clear that the system currently in 
place is not functioning correctly if it failed to catch such errors as 
the Delaware project's. That is why I am working with my colleagues in 
the Corps Reform Caucus to propose a system of independent peer review 
for Corps projects. Many of the mistakes identified by the GAO report 
could have been identified and remedied by independent peer review.
  This process that my colleagues in the House and the Senate and I are 
proposing would not lengthen the Corps' investigation and construction 
process. Indeed, contrary to the claims of some critics, a streamlined 
review process could be applied to Corps projects around the country 
that meet certain criteria, actually speeding up the study and 
construction progress.
  Take the Delaware River project, for example. It has been studied for 
10 years, since 1992. Now the GAO is recommending after a decade that 
the Corps prepare a new and comprehensive economic analysis of the 
project's costs and benefits, address uncertainties, engage an external 
independent party to review the economic analysis, and then resubmit 
that to Congress. This extra review could take years to complete and 
could have been avoided entirely with independent peer review.
  The Army Corps of Engineers has made enormous contributions to our 
Nation's history, to its infrastructure development, and continues to 
play an essential role in water resources management. However, as the 
GAO report pointed out, this is one of several incidents that have 
eroded the public's trust in this planning process.
  I look forward to working with my colleagues to make sure that all 
the Corps projects are economically justified and based on sound 
environmental science. Currently our Subcommittee on Water Resources of 
the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure is working on the 
reauthorization of the Water Resources Development Act, which directs 
these Corps operations. This is a timely opportunity to develop 
legislative language to achieve these reforms.

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