Soft Corps

IN the first year of his presidency, Jimmy Carter went to war with Congress over $239 million worth of funding for 19 public-works projects-most of them involving the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Carter rarely found himself on the right side of a policy issue, but as a trained engineer he could see through the Corps’ specious methods of analysis. The waste and fraud angered him. Once, as governor of Georgia, he had described a Corps study as follows: “It became obvious to me that none of the [Corps’] claims was true. The report was primarily promotional literature supporting construction.”

All of the various dams and water projects on Carter’s “hit list” drained taxpayers in exchange for scant economic benefits, but some invited catastrophe as well. One project, the Auburn Dam, was to be constructed near a fault line in California. A Bureau of Reclamation study had predicted that in the event of an earthquake, dam failure would flood 750,000 people, the state capital, and five military bases.

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Stephen Spruiell

Stephen Spruiell is a former staff reporter for National Review Online.

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Jimmy Carter

George W. Bush

IN the first year of his presidency, Jimmy Carter went to war with Congress over $239 million worth of funding for 19 public-works projects-most of them involving the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Carter rarely found himself on the right side of a policy issue, but as a trained engineer he could see through the Corps’ specious methods of analysis. The waste and fraud angered him. Once, as governor of Georgia, he had described a Corps study as follows: “It became obvious to me that none of the [Corps’] claims was true. The report was primarily promotional literature supporting construction.”

All of the various dams and water projects on Carter’s “hit list” drained taxpayers in exchange for scant economic benefits, but some invited catastrophe as well. One project, the Auburn Dam, was to be constructed near a fault line in California. A Bureau of Reclamation study had predicted that in the event of an earthquake, dam failure would flood 750,000 people, the state capital, and five military bases.