Editorial: WRDA Begging As Feds Squander Billions

The year 2006 has gone the way of yesterday’s six-pack—down the drain. Unless Congress miraculously comes to its senses early in its new session, efforts by proponents to get a meaningful Water Resources Development Act through both houses and signed by the president will go the same way. In the meantime, billions are being squandered on failed efforts of other kinds.

We are all familiar with recovery failures associated with the Hurricane Katrina disaster on the Gulf Coast. Since nothing is always cut and dried, we have to admit that good did come out of the recovery effort, especially the performance of the Coast Guard, but so too has much come out that is bad. We continue to read about failed efforts of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Christmas was no picnic for a lot of Katrina victims.

In the meantime, also close to home, we read that the Coast Guard’s Deepwater program, now ballooned from $17 billion to $24 billion, has stumbled and is failing miserably. The phase to convert rusting 110-foot patrol boats into 123-foot cutters has been canceled due to hull cracks and engine failures, The New York Times reports. The first eight boats of the intended 49-boat conversion program are out of action because they are unseaworthy.

There’s more: flawed designs have halted plans to build a new class of 147-foot ships with innovative hulls.

The Times reports, “The first completed new ship, a $564 million behemoth christened [in November] has structural weaknesses that some Coast Guard engineers believe may threaten its safety and limit its life span, unless costly repairs are made.”

The Coast Guard began its effort to replace nearly its entire fleet of ships, planes and helicopters four years ago. Failures are delaying the arrival of any new ships or aircraft.

The blogs and newspapers are literally filled with stories—accusations and explanations as to why the Deepwater program is failing. A major part of the problem, some say, is a very bad contract the Coast Guard has with program contractors Lockheed Martin Corporation and Northrop Grumman Corporation. The agreement is considered to be one of the largest national security contracts awarded after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

One blog quotes Anthony D’Armiento, a systems engineer who has worked for Northrop and the Coast Guard on the project, as saying, “It is the worst contract arrangement I’ve seen in all my 20 plus years in naval engineering.”

According to The Washington Post, “The program’s failures are spelled out in a series of Government Accountability Office and Department of Homeland Security general’s reports and in congressional testimony, which point to the leeway given to the program’s contractors, Lockheed Martin Corporation and Northrop Grumman Corporation.” Those entities have declined comment, referring all questions to the Coast Guard.

And so goes the show!

Ironically, our first purpose in this column is not to fault FEMA or the Coast Guard. It is to question why (or how) Congress can ignore, year after year, a WRDA package to modernize and maintain U.S. waterways when the need is so critical. The cost of the WRDA program, spread over many years as it would be, is but a drop in the bucket to other federal programs that are failing miserably.

As is usually the case with federal projects, oversight of Deepwater has been almost criminally lacking. According to one blog, “The same sort of contract is going to be used for the new [Mexico] border wall.” We can’t vouch for the accuracy of that statement, but it fits the mold.

Not so ironically, we have never read of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers being sloppy with project oversight. Even the proposed Upper Mississippi/Illinois river projects only came to between $3 billion and $4 billion, and the flap that erupted over the Corps handling of the project came from a total disagreement in the data being fed into the computer model. What we consider unfair criticism has been leveled at modern-day Corps employees for failures of levee and floodwall work that has been carried out over many decades. Many others, not of the Corps, must share the blame for those failures. But the Deepwater fiasco has developed over just a few years.

The failure of FEMA and the Coast Guard to do their jobs well is disheartening to be sure. But in the light of the extreme cost of these failures, it is perplexing why congressional leaders do not insist upon financing sound water resource development activity without even blinking.

We suggest that members of Congress retreat once more to the sanctity of their dens and warm fireplaces, sip some hot chocolate or hot toddies, and rediscover what is important to the economic well being of the United States over the long haul.

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