WEEKLY BASKET: Engineering Boondoggles

While Washington is ringing its hands about the automatic across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is digging taxpayers even deeper into debt by pushing a smorgasbord of wasteful dinosaur projects.
 
Exhibit A: Instead of prioritizing funding on the most economically justified and critically important projects, the Corps is reviving ancient duds like the New Madrid Floodway/St. John’s Bayou project. The New Madrid floodway is an old Mississippi river channel in Missouri’s boot heel. Levees surround the floodway, except for a small gap at the downstream end (near New Madrid, Missouri). When river levels get high enough to threaten flooding in Cairo, Illinois and other cities upstream the Corps \”operates\” the floodway by blowing up parts of the levee, sending millions of gallons of floodwaters across the sparsely populated farm land in the floodway—preventing flooding in Cairo. The water returns back to the river through the gap.