The federal government could be liable up to an unbelievable $500 billion, reports the New York Times' Campbell Robertson, after Federal Judge Stanwood R. Duval ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers did not maintain a navigation channel, leading to Hurricane Katrina flooding. The ruling is in response to ...

Victims of Hurriance Katrina have sued the Army Corps of Engineers for an estimated $100 billion in damages, reports Richard Fauset of the Los Angeles Times.

At the heart of the lawsuit is a widely derided navigational channel, built and operated by the Corps, called the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet. The ...

Washington pushed hard to help North Dakota and Minnesota deal with the rising waters of the Red River. Monica Davey of the New York Times brings information and insights about all the outsiders ready to pitch in:

Along with teams from the Coast Guard, the Department of Health and Human ...

Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post reports that Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, has uncovered $13 million the Army Corps of Engineers stashed away when they should have turned it over to the Iraq government. The funny (though apparently not illegal) business by the Corps ...

This can't be what Donald Rumsfeld had in mind when he said "drain the swamp."

The New York Times' Jamie Glanz reports that a wastewater treatment plant intended to serve the entire city of Falljua is delayed three years and has cost the U.S. taxpayer about $100 million.  Supposed to be completed at the end of 2005, the project didn't even start until 2007. And U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker wasn't even told of the project's many problems, according to federal investigators.

The culprit? The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The New York Times'  Ron Nixon reports that the Democratic-controlled Congress pledge to cut earmarks, the money tacked on to legislation by individual lawmakers for pet projects, is not being heeded. Earmarks in this year's labor and health spending bill making going through Congress ...

The New York Times’ Felicity Barringer reports on a struggle between the Environmental Protection Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers—and local citizens—on how to best use 67,000 acres of Mississippi Delta wetland. The Army Corps of Engineers, which is in charge of federal flood control projects, has proposed since 1941 ...

We can't say nobody warned us.  That's the key to preventive journalism, and one of the reasons Understanding Government will be giving away $50,000 to the best piece of preventive journalism published in the year-long period ending on June 30, 2008.  And there's no shortage of potential topics, as Alex Prud'homme's column in the New York Times makes clear:  even after Hurricane Katrina, few journalists are looking at the threat posed by America's aging network of levees and earthen berms.

In the 2006-2007 school year, the temperature in some of the District of Columbia's public school buildings sometimes hovered just above freezing.  The cause?  Broken boilers.  These weren't old, decrepit systems, but brand-new steel boilers in 55 schools that cost District taxpayers $80 million.  As David Fallis, V. Dion Hayes, and Dan Keating report in the Washington Post, by spending approximately $100,000 district-wide, the school system could have ensured the boilers' trouble-free performance.  How? 

One year and $72 million later, the Baghdad police academy is still a fetid mess, and once again it took a reporter to uncover malfeasance on the part of a U.S. government contractor.  And -- once again -- the Army Corps of Engineers is involved.  Maybe they should just give up and let somebody with a conscience take over.