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 U.S. 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 the EPA, 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, overreaching, and unaccountable agency finally get the keelhaul overhaul that Americans deserve?
Not that I am rooting for the 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 U.S. 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 U.S. Constitution, not us citizens, not our property rights.
Anyone familiar with federal eminent domain knows that it is rife with abuse and below-market values forced on private landowners for the most frivolous purposes. And although some federal agencies will attempt to reach willing-seller-willing-buyer agreements before going nuclear, the USACE just used legal sledgehammers against American landowners from the get-go, because screwdrivers have never been in their toolbox.
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–’70s 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 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 beat it 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 they 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 U.S. military is not supposed to operate on American soil, for damned good reasons, but the USACE does so, with predictably bad results.
USACE is overripe 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 the EPA. 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 U.S. Forest Service, all of which have much better track records dealing with public service than the USACE. And that 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.
Image: Antony-22 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
