today. By various grants of authority from Congress, it has extended its power and influence into many fields of civilian service, including the plum-rich areas of river-and-harbor improvements and flood control.

Theoretically, the corps is responsible to the Secretary of the Army and, through him, to the President. In practice, it has worked out that the engineers deal directly with Congress itself, often arrogantly ignoring, as has been demonstrated in many instances, the expressed wishes of the Commander in Chief. It has become hard to tell now who is the master-Congress or the Corps of Engineers— for, though Congress provides the appropriations for these rich and often wasteful engineering projects, the corps provides the modus operandi and the excuse for the spending of billions on the projects that bring such joy to the home districts of the rivers and harbors bloc Congressmen.

For instance, when the rivers and harbors appropriations bill for fiscal year 1949-the largest in history, incidentally-was up before Congress, Senator Bridges, then Appropriations Committee chairman, and Senator Taft, then majority leader, each asserted publicly that $200,000,000 could be lopped off the proposals with no harm to the Nation's welfare. Did their influence prevail?

Indeed not the bill passed the Senate by a 3 to 1 vote.

The great public fallacy concerning the engineers is an impression that the corps is a peacetime group of Army officers and soldiers gaining valuable experience for war while working on construction projects. That is a lot of brassencased baloney. The truth of the matter is that only some 215 Army officers are assigned to this inland water development program. They are the "brass" who supervise the tasks of more than 40,000 civilian Government employees.

Among these civilians are highly educated, efficient engineers who ordinarily would be granted advancement to top posts which their achievements warranted. But the way the engineers have the system organized, the Army "brass" hold all the top positions and takes all the credit for the accomplishments. So the notion that Army personnel is getting valuable training for war through the Corps of Engineers is plain silly. Furthermore, in wartime Army engineers are not called upon to build dikes and dams for flood control and power production-their job with respect to such structures is to blast them out of existence.

To put it mildly, the engineers seem to have gone hog-wild in lining up projects. There is a segment of the engineering mind which seems to gaze on a God-made landscape with a critical eye. A river must be dammed. A beautiful natural lake must be converted into a reservoir. A swamp which may be a major factor in maintaining water tables in adjacent areas must be drained. If it is "engineeringly feasible," something must be done forthwith, because God didn't do a proper job in the first place and the engineers can improve on His handiwork. In the past few years, the Corps of Engineers has started muscling in on the field of power-producing and irrigation dams, which properly is the responsibility of Reclamation. This has produced considerable agitation within the Reclamation Bureau. The engineers may bestow a project upon an area at low cost to the local citizens, while Reclamation is supposed to set up contracts whereby those who glean the benefits eventually repay the Government. Naturally, human nature being what it is, most communities begin favoring the cheaper projects offered by the negineers over the quasi-pay-as-you-go projects of Reclamation. Reclamation's only weapon, if it is to maintain its hallowed bureaucratic status as the do-gooding, easy-spending patron of the West, is to think up and execute projects faster than the engineers. So a ruinous and costly competition has developed, particularly in the Missouri Valley and the Central Valley of California.

Can I back up these accusations with figures? I'll let Lt. Gen. Raymond A. Wheeler, the recently retired Chief of Engineers, do it for me. In response to a request last fall from one of the rivers and harbors bloc Senators, General Wheeler, then Chief of the Corps, prepared an analysis of what all the Federal agencies-Engineers, Reclamation, Department of Agriculture, and the Federal Power Commission-had spent and were planning to spend on water resources development. By far the lion's share, of course, were Engineers and Reclamation projects. The figures, as taken from the Congressional Record, are:

Of this total, it is highly significant to note that by far the largest single amount $24,086,900,000—is earmarked for Government development of hydroelectric power. This amount is twice the expenditure planned for flood control, and nearly three times as much as is planned for irrigation. If these Government agencies got the green light on all their plans for power development, the new facilities thus constructed would provide more than three times the amount of hydroelectric power that exists in all the United States today.

Now electric energy is fine-you don't even have to argue about the wonders electricity has worked for American homes, farms, and industry-and I am for more of it. But I doubt if even this great Nation needs as much as the engineers and Reclamation would promote.

The Reclamation Bureau was established in Theodore Roosevelt's time to save western farmers from ruinous drought. Though a younger agency than the Corps of Engineers, it has grown up fast. Its activities are principally in the 11 Western States. Because of the popular illusion that all reclamation projects are on the side of the angels, whenever anyone in Congress lifts a questioning voice about this Bureau's expenditures, 22 Western Senators-Republicans and Democrats working as brethren, and their colleagues in the House-rise as a phalanx to beat down the opposition.

Originally, the Reclamation Bureau was supposed to be a self-sustaining project; now it is drawing appropriations from the Treasury that run up as high as $246,619,139 a year-not counting the supplementary appropriations which the Bureau regularly wheedles or blackjacks from Congress. The Bureau's budget request for the coming fiscal year, pending before Congress as this was written, was a record $373,328,500. Personnelwise, the Bureau has grown from 2,853 employees in 1935 to 16,522 in 1948.

Naturally, two such powerful and pork-dispensing organizations have drawn the support of potent lobbies. The National Reclamation Association is one of the more powerful lobbies doing yeoman service for the Bureau of Reclamation. The engineers have a whole string of lobbies behind them, including the aggressive Mississippi Valley Association and the wealthy, influential National Rivers and Harbors Congress. This rivers and harbors lobby has achieved an almost incestuous relationship with the National Congress, as many of the Representatives and Senators who pass on the bills that the group lobbies for are members of the lobby itself, along with the contractors, chambers of commerce, and other special interests that make up the membership. It is an especially ironic note that the incumbent president of the National Rivers and Harbors Congress is none other than United States Senator John McClellan, of Arkansas, who also was a member of the Hoover Commission. As a member of the Commission, Senator McClellan fought to block certain recommendations of our task force that were anathema to the Corps of Engineers, darling of the Rivers and Harbors Congress.

As an example of how the Rivers and Harbors Congress operates, I have in my possession a signed letter from former Senator E. V. Robertson, of my State. He relates how some years ago, when he was a member of the Commerce Subcommittee on Rivers and Harbors, he was invited to attend a convention of the Congress at New Orleans. His invitation was accompanied by a $300 check for expenses.

Regarding this as highly improper-this was the only occasion during my 6 years in the Senate that I received any invitation accompanied by a check for expenses," the Senator wrote me he threw the check back at the organization and declined the invitation. I should like to see the National Rivers and Harbors Congress publish a full list of those to whom it has paid such expenses during its 48 years of operation.

It would be arrogant and intolerant of me to say that no good has come of any projects of the engineers and Reclamation Bureau. The early projects, before they began to dream in the grandiose, wholesale manner, were particularly inspired and beneficial. But I do charge that the performance record now is shot through with examples of rotten planning and wasteful execution.

The most shameful example of piece-meal planning, wasteful competition, and political compromising on the part of both the engineers and Reclamation is the Missouri Basin story. For years the Missouri Basin, approximately one-sixth of the Nation's land area, scene of flood and drought disasters, and a prime example of the need for carefully planned conservation and development, has been the battleground for various bureaus and private pressure groups with axes to grind.

The engineers finally had come up with the ambitious Pick plan, prepared by Lewis A. Pick, now a major general and the new Chief of Engineers. Reclamation produced ints equally ambitious Sloan plan, fathered by W. G. Sloan. The trouble with the two plans was that in many respects they were bitterly contradictory of each other. The engineers, downstream, would be dredging a channel to serve the needs of unnecessary river traffic; upstream, Reclamation would be building a storage dam for irrigation that would deprive the channel of water it required.

In 1944 President Roosevelt recommended a Missouri Valley Authority similar to the Tennessee Valley Authority. That did the trick. The President didn't get his MVA, but the bitter rivals, engineers and Reclamation, were driven into each other's arms for self-preservation. "A shameless, loveless, shotgun wedding," James G. Patton, president of the National Farmers' Union, termed it.

Anyway, a Pick-Sloan plan was agreed upon-a conscienceless bit of political compromising. For example, whereas Sloan formerly objected to two proposed engineers dams-Garrison and Gavin in the Dakotas--as wholly unnecessary and wasteful, he now agreed to the two projects, which will cost some $211,000,000. Garrison already is under construction, and Gavin is planned for the future. The Pick-Sloan plan, which is under way, will cost the taxpayers some $6,300,000,000-an "estimate"-and it will not serve the needs of the Missouri Valley adequately, as it still is a crazy-quilt, nonintegrated program.

I will go a step further and predict that, unless firm steps are taken, President Truman will have trouble in bringing about his proposed Columbia Valley Authority plan. Both Engineers and Reclamation have staked out claims on this area. I have seen the 14 volumes of plans that the engineers have prepared for Columbia River development; the documents weigh 41 pounds and make a stack more than a foot and a half high. Unless the President can be effectively tough— and the engineers have sabotaged the wishes of Presidents many times in the past-another Pick-Sloan deal may result for the Columbia Valley.

The Colorado-Big Thompson project is still another example of malodorous planning of an undertaking designed to consume millions of the taxpayers' dollars--this one on the part of Reclamation. Big Thompson is a' colossal scheme to pump water from the western slope of the Rockies to the eastern slope by tunneling 131⁄2 miles through the mighty Continental Divide, that granite backbone of the American Continent. Reclamation went blithely ahead, estimated the project would cost $44,000,000, obtained congressional approval on that basis, and even made contracts with the eastern-slope farmers to deliver water for supplemental irrigation.

The project got under way; then it began expanding. Those usual difficulties and modifications that "were not anticipated" began cropping up. At last count the $44,000,000 job had grown into a $144,581,000 project, of which $68,000,000 already had been expended. And the latest development is the discovery that Colorado-Big Thompson will not provide the amount of water Reclamation has guaranteed to deliver to the eastern slope after all, so a new study will be launched to discover other water sources and develop them. We'll be lucky if we get off for $200,000,000.

This building of great irrigation dams by Reclamation without determining whether water will be available is, unfortunately, common. To mention just one example, Kendrick project, in Wyoming, a $24,000,000 job, was built in 1934-35, and no surplus water was available for it until 1947. The Federal Government, according to a survey which has been made for me, hast lost at least $9,000,000 on various projects through just this kind of unreliable estimating, and farmers have lost many millions more. As far back as 1936 the National Resources Committee reported that "abandoned farms * * * now stand as pathetic monuments to misplaced confidence in fragmentary data."

Hell's Canyon project, on the Snake River along the Idaho-Oregon border, is a ripe example of what happens when Engineers and Reclamation get to competing with each other. This is part of the Columbia Valley program, where both agencies are jockeying for position.

Each agency got up a set of plans for the project, and preparation of the rival plans alone cost the taxpayers some $143,000, most of which was spent by the engineers, before a shovel even was turned.

While Hell's Canyon is by no means the worst example of money being wasted through duplicating plans-the Central Valley basin project in California, for instance, offers more glaring examples-I mention it because of the conflicting results of the two surveys. The engineers have come up with a proposal for a $372,000,000 multiple-purpose dam, 710 feet high, which would impound 3,280,000

acre-feet of water for power production. Reclamation proposes a 607-foot dam which would impound 3,500,000 acre-feet of water, and its estimated cost is $433,660,000.

That somebody can't add-or doesn't want to-does not surprise me, however. I have a report prepared for me by the Izaak Walton League of America analyzing what happened in 16 Reclamation Bureau projects. These 16 projects were underestimated by the staggering total of $443,143,400.

Another glaring example of cockeyed estimating is a Montana dam that originally was scheduled to cost some $48,000,000. The latest estimate is $108,800,000. This one is aptly named the Hungry Horse project, and it is located, equally aptly, on the Flathead River.

With this background of bungling and wastefulness thus uncovered, our task force made three principal recommendations designed to correct the particular evils which I have discussed. They were:

1. That the Corps of Engineers be stripped of its civil river-development functions; that a consolidated water development service be established to take over these functions, plus all functions of the Bureau of Reclamation, plus other power-marketing and river-development functions administered by the Departments of Interior and State, the Federal Power Commission, and the Bonneville and Southwestern Power Administrations. In this connection, we recommended retention of TVA, but opposed establishment of additional valley authorities. 2. Abolition of the Department of the Interior and creation of a new Department of Natural Resources to administer the consolidated water development service and other affiliated Federal activities now loosely administered in various departments.

3. Establishment within the President's Office of a Board of Coordination and Review to pass on every major water-development project from the time it is first proposed, in order to make certain that boondoggles, frills, and duplicating activities are chopped off before they sprout.

Even before our task-force report was made public, the fight was launched to keep the Army engineers firmly entrenched in the civilian contracting business. The engineers' lobby got to work, and soon contractors, civil groups and Congressmen were deluged by thousands of identically worded telegrams and resolutions, asking them to join the fight to save the engineers. One of the ridiculous arguments advanced was that only the Army Corps of Engineers had the engineering know-how to carry out these projects. Bunk. As I pointed out earlier, there are only 215 Army engineer officers supervising the work of 40,000 civilians, and the civilians could carry on beautifully without the brass.

The situation became so bad that Mr. Hoover found it necessary to make a public denunciation of these propaganda efforts by the engineers. The Chief of Engineers thereupon disclaimed responsibility for the pressure campaign; nevertheless, the Hoover Commission has in its files transcripts of antireorganization speeches made throughout the country by district engineers.

The majority of the Hoover Commission itself backed the essence of our recommendation, with the exception that retention of the Interior Department as the agency to administer all water-development projects was favored. Three members of the Commission, including the Vice Chairman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, filed a separate report backing our recommendation to create a Department of Natural Resources. And the expected dissenting report was turned in by two members one of whom, of course, was Senator McClellan, president of the proengineers lobby, the National Rivers and Harbors Congress-stoutly defending the Army engineers.

Even before the Hoover report was released, Senator McClellan announced he would fight to have the Army engineers exempted from reorganization. While he was overruled on the Commission, Senator McClellan's opposition is likely to be most formidable, since he also is chairman of the Senate Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, to which the Hoover report is referred for action.

No one realizes better than I that it is almost a Don Quixote gesture to tilt a lance at the solidly anchored windmill that is the Army engineers' lobby. But I feel that if the long-suffering texpayers can be aroused through publication of this article, perhaps enough blows can unsettle that expensive windmill.

The most brazen example of autocracy on the part of the Army engineers is related in the portion of our task-force report dealing with the Kings River project in the basin of the Central Valley of California. Our committee is indebted to Arthur A. Maas, of Harvard University, who served as one of our

consultants on water resources, for his thorough and documented case history of the Kings River project, wherein the Army engineers repeatedly-and successfully-defied two Presidents of the United States to achieve jurisdiction over a construction job which was not rightfully theirs.

The Central Valley Basin, containing more than one-third of California's acreage, for years has been faced by an increasingly urgent water-development problem. Though the flood factor is present, the problem primarily is one of irrigation for the farmers of the area. Thus, the responsibility fell squarely within the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Reclamation. Notwithstanding this, the Corps of Engineers in 1937 entered into competition with Reclamation to grab off a $20,000,000 project in the Kings River area.

President Roosevelt's attention was called to this senseless and costly con flict, and he took time from his more pressing duties to order that the conflicting surveys be cleared with the Water Resources Committee of his National Resources Planning Board and then sent to him before being submitted to Congress. Reclamation followed his instructions. The engineers, who traditionally have felt they are responsible to Congress rather than to the President, sidetracked the Water Resources Committee and sent the report directly to the White House Through some unexplained circumstance-believed to be a clerical error-Roose velt's wishes were frustrated by the White House administrative machinery, which slipped up and forwarded the report to Congress.

Thus, in 1940, Congress received the two conflicting and nonintegrated reports. Then began a 7-year struggle over the project. Roosevelt repeatedly and often curtly warned his Secretary of War that he wanted the Kings River project built by Interior. Just as repeatedly, the Corps of Engineers went to Congress and were able to balk the President's wishes. The point at stake was that, under the Reclamation system of repayment by the consumers for water supplied by the Government, the Federal Treasury would receive a greater return than under the engineers' plan of relatively insignificant participation by the consumers.

All during the war, President Roosevelt had to take time out to battle with the engineers. After Mr. Roosevelt died, President Truman took up the fight just as firmly. These efforts by two Commanders in Chief bothered the engineers not one bit. Their will prevailed; Congress gave the engineers authority and funds to build the Kings River project, and the Federal Treasury is going to suffer considerably as a result of this.

This same maneuver by the engineers has been repeated on more than a dozen other projects. Furthermore, in 1941 the engineers effectively spiked a direct order of President Roosevelt's to coordinate their projects with the Federal Bureau of the Budget. When the President's Budget Bureau reported adversely on 76 out of 436 Corps of Engineers projects, the Chief of Engineers merely submitted the 76 objectionable projects to Congress, over the President's head. Congress authorized 62 of them.

It's no wonder that both President Hoover and Roosevelt used to exclaim privately that, if someone only could show them how to curb the Army engineers, they really could save some money for the United States.

The whole thing is as fantastically ridiculous as if General Eisenhower, on the eve of the Normandy invasion, were to have been overruled by his sergeantchauffeur, who might have wanted to spend the next week end in London instead of France.

But it's no laughing matter. I submit that, when agencies such as the Army Corps of Engineers or any others can whip Presidents and Congress all around the stump, there's something vitally wrong with our system of democratic government.

That is why I am willing to risk the displeasure of the do-gooders, the floodcontrollers and the water-developers by tackling the two sacred cows of flood control and reclamation. If we can strike a blow for sanity in spending, before our national water bill drowns our economy, the work of our Hoover Commission task force will have been worth while.

Mr. McGREGOR. I would like to call to your attention specific charges, and I am quoting.

The principal charges I must bring against the Army engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, as a result of my investigations as chairman of the Hoover Commission's natural resources task force, are these:

The two agencies are so violently jealous of each other that an extravagant and wholly senseless competition has sprung up. They will encroach on each