[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 1]
[House]
[Pages 1165-1166]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        MISSISSIPPI RIVER LEVEE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Hultgren). The Chair recognizes the 
gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, one of the few areas where Washington 
agrees with the general public is that our current path is not 
sustainable. It is not merely a case of spending too much or taxing too 
little, although we need to control spending and we must and will be 
raising revenue to meet the needs of an aging and growing population.
  The key is to do business differently, to extract more value out of 
our programs. We need to have the courage to pivot, to do things 
better, to not follow the reflex of the usual economic and political 
groups fighting to continue to protect the status quo and the 
continuing trend lines.
  In a world already impacted by climate change and global weather 
instability, these forces are going to intensify. One of the best 
examples of why we must change is how we deal with reengineering nature 
as a response to natural disasters.
  I salute Governor Cuomo for the use of some of the Hurricane Sandy 
money from the Federal Government to move people out of harm's way, not 
just throw good money after bad by relocating and rebuilding in exactly 
the same way, in exactly the same place, where nature repeatedly shows 
that people are not wanted.
  I was before the Rules Committee arguing for greater reform in the 
Federal spending, but the Governor is pointing in the right direction.
  This week we are watching another chapter in the same drama play out 
in the lower Mississippi, where there is an argument to continue the 
self-defeating effort to fortify the Mississippi River, closing a gap 
in the levee, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to prevent an 
area in the flood plain from flooding every now and then.
  The Federal Government has already made periodic flooding in that 
area as part of its relief valve, to take the excess water and avoid 
more flooding elsewhere. Failing to allow nature to take its course 
invites a bigger disaster as more and more water is forced into the 
narrow fortified walls of the Mississippi.
  Think about how we have shortened and narrowed that river. We haven't 
reduced the amount of water; we've just reduced the areas where it can 
go. It makes the inevitable flooding worse. Building a levee is simply 
going to move it a little further downstream.
  The solution is to allow the river to go where nature wants it, not 
encourage farmers to cultivate even more land that will be vulnerable 
to crop loss, more disaster relief, more crop insurance loss, and to 
take away increasingly scarce wildlife habitat for the millions of 
Americans who would like to hunt and fish. Done right, this can be a 
virtuous cycle. It saves tax dollars, improves the environment, reduces 
the damage from flooding and all the attendant costs.
  It is a classic example of where the Federal Government should learn 
from 200 years' experience of trying to engineer the Mississippi River 
and instead allow, in some cases, nature to take its course and avoid 
more expensive and worse damage.
  This is what we need to do across the Federal Government. We don't 
have to spend twice as much money on health care as most of the 
developed countries for outcomes that are mediocre at best. We don't 
have to spend more money on defense than 12 or 13 of the remaining 
largest defense budgets and on weapons that in many cases, like our 
nuclear arsenal where we have far more than we need and can ever use 
and can afford, we can pare down, save tens of billions of dollars and 
still be the most

[[Page 1166]]

powerful Nation in the world; or the outrageous crop insurance that 
encourages reckless and expensive behavior by paying farmers to plant 
crops on land that never should have been cultivated in the first 
place.

                              {time}  1210

  While we will control spending and increase revenues, the most 
important thing we can do is to change the way we do business, using 
common sense, proven technology, stretching our tax dollars, and making 
our communities more livable. We can start by not pressuring the Corps 
of Engineers to complete the levees, spending millions of dollars we 
don't have on a solution that will make the problem worse. Let's work, 
instead, to understand the impacts of global warming and extreme 
weather and then do something about it.

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