Water projects

In April, the House approved its $15 billion version of a new federal water projects bill. In May, the slightly more parsimonious Senate approved a $14 billion version.

At that point, the package went to a panel of Senate and House negotiators, who hammered out a compromise that would cost taxpayers, um … $20 billion.

The Army Corps of Engineers already faces a huge backlog of $38 billion in authorized projects. Yet this new congressional pork roll lards on numerous new mandates dealing with wastewater, drinking water, sewers, waterfront development, transportation and abandoned mines — all of which are "outside of and inappropriate for the mission" of the Corps, White Hosue budget director Rob Portman and the Army’s John Paul Woodley wrote in a letter to Congress.

They also warn that the measure authorizes new cost-sharing language for projects "that would shift potentially billions of dollars of cost" from local governments onto the shoulder of federal taxpayers.

And many of the costliest projects in this bill stand in shining tribute to the first law of the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, who declared that every government intervention generates unintended consequences, which lead the original sponsors to demand costly new government interventions to fix the problems they caused with their first intervention.

For instance, the new bill includes another $3.5 billion to help out Louisiana, damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

But big storms have been hitting the Gulf coast for millennia. The real problem in Louisiana today is that the Corps of Engineers has channelized the Mississippi, while spending billions to prevent it from flowing west into the Atchafalaya, as it would do if left to its own devices.

Because the channelized river is no longer able to inundate the surrounding marshes with silt, that surrounding land has been subsiding till it’s now below the level of the river itself — a recipe for disaster any time a cynical local politician shifts funds away from levee maintenance. This is a man-made problem.

Also included in the "compromise" bill is $2 billion for projects in Florida, mostly for restoring the Everglades. But the Everglades are in poor shape in large part because swamps to the north have been drained and rivers there channelized … by the Corps of Engineers.

Another $1.95 billion is included for new locks on the Mississippi and Illinois rivers and $1.7 billion for fixing the region’s ecology, which has been damaged in large part by the interventions of … oh, you know.

Because the bill’s authorization now "significantly exceeds the cost of either the House or Senate bill and contains other unacceptable provisions … the president will veto the bill," Mr. Portman and Mr. Woodley warned on Wednesday.

As well he should.