Corps Reforms, Deep-Sea Mining Highlighted At AAPA Dredging Panel
Interagency cooperation and ongoing efforts to streamline Corps of Engineers permitting and decision-making processes in dredging projects were highlighted at a recent panel at the American Association of Port Authorities (AAPA), along with the launching by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s encouragement of deep-sea mining efforts.
The two-part panel was hosted and introduced by Jon Nass, CEO and executive director of the Port of Gulfport, Miss.; panelists were Lee Forsgren, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army (Civil Works) since March, and Erik Noble, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Oceans and Atmosphere at NOAA.
Whole Of Government
Forsgren began by sketching out the “whole of government” approach by which the Corps is reviewing and streamlining its procedures, including its approach to dredging windows. Forsgren helped Adam Telle, recently promoted to acting Secretary of the Army, develop his “Building Infrastructure, Not Paperwork” initiative. Forsgren admitted that there remain “rough spots and tensions” in rolling this out. “It sometimes takes longer to fill out the paperwork than to do the actual dredging,” he said.
Noble served in NOAA during Trump’s first term, being dubbed “Trump’s eyes and ears” there by the administration’s critics. He began by pointing out that he disagreed with the formerly conventional wisdom that NOAA is a pure science agency that doesn’t make policy. In fact, he said, NOAA’s recommendations to the Corps do make policy changes happen. “We are one of the biggest civilian regulatory agencies, and now, in Trump’s second administration, we can’t do things the way we have always done them,” he said.
Interagency Collaboration
Both Noble and Forsgren stressed the need for greater interagency collaboration. Forsgren said the Corps was working on a “national framework” to coordinate data on the approximately 1,200 dredging windows across all agencies. “The days of linear evaluations are over,” Forsgren proclaimed. He said he’s not ready to publish it or release a timeline for doing so, but the framework will focus on increasing speed and efficiency of dredging in ways that don’t involve adding physical assets. “Under the current system, we probably do have a ‘dredging shortfall,’ Sometimes we can be our own biggest hurdle,” he said. ‘But there’s a lot we can do to improve.”
Noble said the data sets that NOAA collects have vastly improved in the past ten years. He pointed out that NOAA has the largest fleet of civilian satellites in space. He said coordinating the data and making it inter-operational across agencies will help speed dredging decisions.
Forsgren gave a real-life example of that cooperation. The Corps was seven to eight days away from shutting down the Tall Ships event in July in New York Harbor celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States, due to dredging that needed to be completed at several piers. The Corps worked with NOAA to get needed permits in 30 hours and the event went on as scheduled.
Beneficial Use Of Material
Forsgren said the Corps was also working to expand the definition of beneficial use of material, saying current definitions are too narrow. For example, he said companies that deposit dredged material that slows the erosion or degradation of coastlines should receive credits for that work, in addition to whatever other stated benefits the material provides.
WOTUS Map
Noble said NOAA is also working with the Corps on hyper-accurate maps of regulated waters of the Unites States. Determining whether a project impinges on a regulated water is something that municipalities often spend thousands of tens of thousands of dollars on consultants to determine. “Wouldn’t you like not to have to spend that on a consultant?” Noble asked. The first version of the map, accurate to withing ten meters, will be in lawmakers’ hands within 18 months, he said. A later version will be accurate to within two meters and should be ready withing another 19 months, he said.
“We could not have developed that tool five years ago,” he said, due to interoperability issues, among others. The map is being developed by the Water Subcabinet, an interagency group co-chaired by the Secretary of the Interior that includes the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Commerce and the Department of Energy.
Deep Sea Mining
In the panel’s second part, Sean Duffy, president and CEO of Big River Coalition, and Bill Hanson, senior vice president of Great Lakes Dredge and Dock joined the panelists. Hanson pointed out that GLDD has taken delivery of the new hopper dredge Amelia Island in August 2025 and the subsea rock installation vessel Acadia in June 2026, so support offshore drilling and subsea mining. “American offshore energy production ought to be built and maintained by Americans,” he said. The dredging techniques involved are straightforward.
Hanson said he was “excited to see the Corps take a hard look at its contracting model,” and noted that Telle announced his signature “Build Infrastructure, Not Paperwork” initiative to GLDD officials only a day after he had announced it internally. “So we were in on the ground floor.”
Duffy noted that “every day is a dredging day” on the Mississippi River. Asked about anchorages, he noted that the Pilottown anchorage is either the first or last anchorage on the Lower Mississippi River, depending on whether a vessel is coming or going, and that a problem there could shut down the entire river. “We definitely need to maintain anchorages,” he said.
On deep-sea mining, Noble noted that NOAA is the agency authorized to issue permits for deep-sea nodule collection, although he said that not a single permit for commercial collection has yet been issued. “China is already doing it, they’re just not talking about it,” he said. “We are going to make deep-sea mining happen. He noted that the Interior Department has unified the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement into the Marine Minerals Administration, whose mission is to “oversee the responsible development of the nation’s offshore energy and marine mineral resources with an integrated focus on safety, environmental protection and efficient oversight,” according to its website.
