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Archive → October, 2025

US Army Corps of Engineers: America’s Black Hole in Need of Cosmic Level Fixing

Because it is a relatively small part of our big military and kept in a dusty back room far from the shiny B-2 bombers, the US Army Corps of Engineers has been off the radar of legislators and commanders-in-chief alike since George Washington ended his presidency. But in the intervening 250 years since its founding, the USACE has gone from building bridges for troops and cannons, to aggressively stealing private property rights and forcing a Marxist environmentalist agenda on domestic citizens under the guise of “civil works.” Of all the federal agencies I have dealt with professionally and personally, including USEPA where I worked for seven years, the USACE has had the biggest mission creep in the worst directions of all. So, for USACE’s 250th birthday this year, can we please give Americans a gift of freedom, and see this most hidebound, insular, destructive, over-reaching, and unaccountable agency finally get the keelhaul overhaul that Americans deserve?

Not that I am rooting for Navy here, but our sacred Army has no business getting its good hands dirty with the USACE’s lawlessness. Big change must happen there, and with fresh new appointees from the Trump Administration, hope should be on the horizon. I hope these appointees are tough as nails, because they are facing a deeply entrenched bureaucracy as jealous of its ill-gotten power as any other federal agency has been, and they have the arrogant, dismissive staff culture to show for it.

USACE “manages” 12.5 million acres of formerly private land, much of it associated with water projects for hydropower, flood control, and public recreation. Sounds useful and wholesome enough: Waterskiing, fishing, hiking, families picnicking, with downstream communities protected from heavy rains up in the watersheds. Problem is, most of USACE’s flood control lakes are heavily silted in and barely functioning as advertised or designed. And probably 95% of this enormous land collection was obtained at gunpoint, through eminent domain against private American landowners, including the Seneca Nation, who still have a formal land treaty with the US government that was reached with George Washington himself, and which the USACE violated.

Absolutely nothing and no one is sacred to the USACE; not the US Constitution, not us citizens, not our property rights.

Anyone familiar with federal eminent domain knows it is rife with abuse and below-market values forced on private landowners for the most frivolous purposes. And while some federal agencies will attempt to reach willing-seller-willing-buyer agreements before going nuclear, the USACE just used legal sledgehammers against American landowners right from the get-go, because screwdrivers have never been in their toolbox.

But the situation is worse than just USACE’s rampant takings of privately owned lands that could have easily served the USACE’s goals while remaining in private ownership. Back in the 1950s-1970s good ol’ days of “Big Government Knows Best,” when the agency was most active, the USACE also stripped many of its condemned properties of their valuable subsurface oil, gas and or mineral rights, too, without paying for them. Not content with taking the surface rights for managing surface water, the agency simply took what it wanted and dared the beaten-down landowners to try to beat them in government courts. Today, millions of Americans are deprived of substantial and highly valuable subsurface private property rights at nearly every single USACE water resource project. These oil, gas, and mineral rights should be in their families’ private ownership, but are wasting away under USACE theft and neglect.

A group of military engineers and their civilian hangers-on have no business running public recreation facilities on American soil. The USACE’s job started as support of military combat troops in 1775, and it is incredible that we are having this discussion in 2025. The marrying of USACE hydroelectric dams and flood control facilities to public service recreation has not worked, because the agency’s staff developed a culture of untouchable bullies. The US military is not supposed to operate on American soil, for damned good reasons, but the USACE does so, with predictably bad results.

USACE is over-ripe for huge change. At the very least USACE needs the deep cleaning treatment of staff and structure that chief administrator Lee Zeldin is doing over at USEPA. USACE’s “civil works” must be spun off to actual civilian oversight and management in the agencies that have historically done this kind of public service and natural resource management. Nearly all of USACE’s physical assets should be moved to the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and the US Forest Service, all of which have much better track records dealing with public service than the USACE. Which is saying a lot, because all of these federal agencies have had real rough patches in their public land management history and public service interface cultures, too.

Josh First wrote his 1991 master’s thesis on the USACE’s nationwide water resource projects, and, ironically, has randomly ended up owning substantial acreages adjoining two USACE water resource projects in Pennsylvania as an entrepreneur. He will write about his own related experiences with USACE in future essays.

This essay originally appeared at American Thinker.

 

Playin’ the Quatar in the quicksand

Past few weeks I have been overwhelmed with the fast pace of everything, including my work, and just let the last blog post stand as the latest word on things: America is badly divided, really like two different countries at this point. President Trump is about to declare the Insurrection Act in effect, something this blog advocated back in 2020. Lawless judges continue to try to play policy pro with legal cases that require a simple Yes or No ruling. It has been amazing to watch the “Blue” states and jurisdictions demand that the Feds stay out of their crime waves. They like their crime, and by God, they are gonna keep it…forgetting tha we Americans have a right to go anywhere in America without fear of being beaten to death.

Then again, the 1940s-1950s Democrat-run South was like this: Lawless, violent, in open revolt against the federal government’s effort to integrate public schools.

But President Trump stole the show with his effort to bring peace of some sort to Gaza and Israel. This looks like languidly playing a Quatar-guitar while also sinking into the Middle East quicksand. Because the people supposedly facilitating this momentary conclusion of hostilities with Trump are the very same people who have been stoking the same conflict for the past seventy years, including on our own American college campuses: Qatar.

For decades, Qatar has dumped billions of dollars into American college campuses to buy entire programs filled with far-Left Marxist pseudo professors who preach hatred of America, Christianity, Capitalism, Israel, and Western Civilization. Qatar is a tiny postage stamp of a country with more oil money than it can use at home, so it is very effectively using it to eat into America’s foundation with jihadism and faux journalism.

Maybe Trump is playing Qatar here, but it sure openly looks like Qatar is playing Trump, luring him in with unrealistic promises meant to further weaken America and Israel, bog down America in the Middle East quicksand, and stop the anti-jihad momentum that Israel and America have been successfully implementing the past six months.

For example, now American troops are supposedly going to be stationed in Gaza to enforce the ceasefire….a stupider idea cannot be invented, but here it is. Our own troops will be at the mercy of Hamas, and will serve as a block on Israel being able to get Hamas back in the genie bottle. Anything that happens to our troops will be blamed on Israel. A wedge will be further inserted between these two great natural allies, America and Israel, and the only people benefiting are the jihadis of Qatar, Hamas, Turkey, and Iran.

Maybe it will hold, and it will all work out great. I am no pessimist, but I am a realist. I admire President Trump’s willingness to take big chances for the right reasons, but I also worry that he tends to see everything in the world narrowly through his own lens of golf courses, resorts, and money-solves-all-problems. Including the flea-infested quicksands of the Middle East, which have historically eaten up and spit out the bones of many different great civilizations. Sometimes reality just has to be accepted, no matter how frustrating or painful: appeasement is not peace, and appeasing the jihadis only encourages them to do more damage.

America is not too big to fail in Gaza, and a lot is riding on the line. Good luck to America and Israel and to our entire Western Civilization.