Water Bill Passes U.S. Senate; Bush Says Clean Water Funds "Unacceptable"

Washington, D.C., May 17 (EIRNS)- -In a veto-proof vote, 91 to 4, on May 16 the U.S. Senate passed the bi-partisan Water Resources Development Act authorizing over $13.9 billion in critical water projects. No WRDA bill has been in effect since 2000, leaving the maintenance and improvements of the nation's waterways and safe drinking and waste water systems to a patchwork of funding options which in no way have kept pace with the nation's needs.

From flood control, to Louisiana levees, to navigation and safe drinking water projects, the WRDA of 2007 authorizes the projects to meet the "acute and unmet water infrastructure needs" of our country, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said after the bill's passage. Among the 100-plus U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projects which the bill authorizes, is a critical project to build modern locks and dams on the Upper Mississippi and Illinois Rivers -- urgently needed for nearly two decades -- which will "improve navigation and increase capacity," according to Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking member of the EPW Committee. Inhofe vowed to "expedite" the bill into a House-Senate conference and get it to the President "as soon as possible." Over $900 million is for restoring 100-year-level hurricane protection for New Orleans and vicinity.

But the White House response to the bill's threatened passage a week ago on May 11 was all but a threat to veto. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in the Executive Office of the President, called the bill an exercise in "wasteful spending." It singled out the bill's provisions for "local wastewater and drinking water infrastructure" as frivolous, lacking "fiscal restraint," and "unacceptable."

Statesman and Democratic Party activist Lyndon LaRouche has led a decades-long fight to get Congress and several administrations to fix and fund the nation's water infrastructure deficit. In a 1982 pamphlet titled, "Won't You Please Give Your Grandchildren a Drink of Fresh Water?" LaRouche identified our "greatest environmental danger" in the coming two decades would be that "whole regions of our nation will simply run out of usable fresh-water supplies." By 2002, then leading a fight to restore the FDR legacy within the Democratic Party of building great infrastructure projects, LaRouche issued a special report, "Science and Infrastructure." Identifying critical projects the nation urgently needed, including on the waterways, he called for across-the-board action on the infrastructure crisis: "The most urgent of the immediate ... physical-economic U.S. reforms required" are ... "sweeping measures for rebuilding the systems of power generation and distribution, water management, land reclamation, healthcare, and education..."

A summary of LaRouche's record on global water projects is at,A review of his "Science and Infrastructure" report is at,