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with dams and dredges, they saluted and obeyed. But it39。 s also true that the Corps helps shape that will. In recent years the Government Accountability Office, the National Academies of Science and the Pentagon inspector general have documented the agency39。 s bias toward approving projects that keep its 35,000 employees busy and its congressional paymasters happy. In 2020 its leaders were caught cooking an economic analysis to justify a $1 billion upper Mississippi River lock project and launching a secret Program Growth Initiative to lard their budget with makework. In New Orleans, the Corps endorsed a $750 million lock on the Industrial Canal even though its economists considered it a waste of money。 the agency justified it by citing increasing use, even though use was decreasing. Pam Dashiell, a munity activist in the Lower Ninth Ward, fought for years against the Gulf Outlet and the Industrial Canal lock, lobbying Corps officials and Louisiana politicians to focus on safety instead. But both projects were on the wish list of the port, the city39。 s most powerful interest. Dashiell remembers the hostility of Congressmen like Democrat William Jefferson, now indicted on corruption charges, and Republican David Vitter, now embroiled in a prostitution scandal. They said I was an obstructionist, she says. I was like, Where are your priorities?39。 Her workingclass Holy Cross neighborhood had one of the highest elevations in New Orleans, but it was nearly wiped out by the surge that blasted up the Gulf Outlet and tore through floodwalls along the Industrial Canal— just a stone39。 s throw from the whiteelephant lock project. For the .39。 s waterresources system, these haphazard priorities are a feature, not a bug. The Corps is funded almost exclusively by earmarks, individual slices of pork requested by individual Congressmen. Since ., Presidents have routinely tried to rein in the agency, with little success. After the Program Growth scandal, the Clinton Administration issued a gentle reminder that Corps generals are supposed to report to their superiors in the Pentagon chain of mand but speedily retracted it following a venomous outcry from their real superiors on Capitol Hill. President Bush keeps proposing zero funding for most of the Corps projects that taxpayer and environmental groups hate, but Congress continues to fund them anyway. So the . has no waterresources policy, just a readytobuild waterresources agency whose agenda is dictated by an annual funding freeforall among its 535 bosses. It39。 s a classic example of Washington39。 s iron triangle: mercial interests lobby the Corps and their Congressmen for projects that supply the Corps with work and political cover and help the Congressmen steer jobs and money to constituents and contributors. It39。 s a sinister system, says American Water Resources Association president Gerry Galloway, a former Army brigadier general who is now a visiting scholar at the Corps. Water is a nationalsecurity issue, but we treat it like the Wild West. The big guns get the money. Katrina didn39。 t change that system. Louisiana Senators Vitter and Mary Landrieu promptly proposed a bloated quartertrilliondollar Louisiana reconstruction bill, drafted by lobbyists for oil, shipping and other corporate interests. The request included $40 billion for the Corps— 10 times the agency39。 s budget for the rest of the nation— including nonreconstruction projects like the Industrial Canal lock and a New Iberia port deepening that had flunked the Corps39。 costbenefit tests. It also included preKatrina coastal levee schemes, with names like ManzatotheGulf and DonaldsonvilletotheGulf to suggest their grandiose sweep. The bill stalled after it was widely mocked as legislative looting, but it sent the message that preKatrina priorities were still in effect. Vitter kept pushing a measure to help timber panies harvest cypress swamps. Landrieu tucked language into emergency bills ordering the Corps to redo its New Iberia analysis and fasttracking the Industrial Canal lock. Katrina was just a perfect excuse to pull the old pork off the shelf in the name of otherwisewedrown, says Tulane law professor Oliver Houck, the sage of Louisiana environmentalism. And away we go: another Louisiana hayride. The Path Forward The hayride has not yet left the barn. Since Katrina, the Corps has focused on repairing and improving its New Orleans defenses: rebuilding or strengthening 220 miles of the city39。 s 350 miles of levees (about 350 km of New Orleans39。 560km levee system), installing gigantic pumps and gates along the lake and releasing blockbyblock maps to publicize lingering flood risks. Some engineers believe the new levees are still too short and weak— They39。 re a frigging disgrace, . Berkeley39。 s Bea says— and the new pumps repeatedly malfunctioned during testing. But the Corps is about to unveil its plan for 100year protection, with a rumored price tag of $15 billion, and the agency says that by 2020 the city will be safe from severe storms, though not from storms as severe as Katrina. The Corps has even proposed to close the Gulf Outlet, a stunning turnaround after 40 years. We39。 re being much, much more conservative, says Thomas Podany, a Corps manager in New Orleans. The real controversies involve a separate study of Category 5 protection and restoration for the entire Louisiana coast. The initial plans floated by the Corps and its state partners proposed a Maginot Line of towering new levees that evoke the levees only policy that failed on the Mississippi River, this time seeking to confine the Gulf. Water needs to go somewhere, and the agency39。 s own modeling suggested that DonaldsonvilletotheGulf would not only cut off vast swaths of wetlands but also double storm surges in some areas by piling up water and concentrating it。