Who really is to blame for funding/underfunding Army Corps projects?
Here's a great article which goes into how the ACE get's their funding and how it's spent. Specifically, how LA prioritized the funding they did receive (hint: it wasn't levees).
Although not highlighted, the article points out that the Bush Administration sided with NO citizens (mostly black and poor) fighting a floodgate project against the City and State. Perhaps this was just a ruse to hide the racist intentions that some people keep claiming the Bush Administration has?
But over the five years of President Bush's administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large.
But overall, the Bush administration's funding requests for the key New Orleans flood-control projects for the past five years were slightly higher than the Clinton administration's for its past five years.
Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the chief of the Corps, has said that in any event, more money would not have prevented the drowning of the city, since its levees were designed to protect against a Category 3 storm, and the levees that failed were already completed projects.
Strock has also said that the marsh-restoration project would not have done much to diminish Katrina's storm surge, which passed east of the coastal wetlands
The Corps had been studying the possibility of upgrading the New Orleans levees for a higher level of protection before Katrina hit, but Woodley said that study would not have been finished for years.
In fact, more than any other federal agency, the Corps is controlled by Congress; its $4.7 billion civil works budget consists almost entirely of "earmarks" inserted by individual legislators.