get:
Ex-Army Corps officials say budget cuts imperiled flood mitigation efforts
By Jason Vest and Justin Rood jvest@govexec.com
As levees burst and floods continued to spread across areas hit by Hurricane Katrina yesterday, a former chief of the Army Corps of Engineers disparaged senior White House officials for "not understanding" that key elements of the region's infrastructure needed repair and rebuilding.
Mike Parker, the former head of the Army Corps of Engineers, was forced to resign in 2002 over budget disagreements with the White House. He clashed with Mitch Daniels, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, which sets the administration's annual budget goals.
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Parker -- who, along with members of his family, was forced to evacuate his Mississippi farm on Sunday night -- drew media attention (and the White House's ire) in 2002 by telling the Senate Budget Committee that a White House proposal to cut just over $2 billion from the Corps' $6 billion budget request would have a "negative impact" on the national interest. Parker also noted that cuts would mean the end of scores of contracts and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.
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Amid the largesse, however, Congress and the administration have made targeted cuts, some of them in Louisiana. As New Orleans City Business noted earlier this year, the Corps' construction budget for the district has gone from $147 million in fiscal 2001 to $82 million in fiscal 2005. Scores of projects, from efforts to build levees, canals and pumping stations to bridge improvements -- all of which deal with flood mitigation -- are incomplete. (The administration's fiscal 2006 budget proposal cut construction funding for the district even further, to $56 million.)
much more at
http://govexec.com/dailyfed/0905/090105jv1.htm
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