It was not uncommon for the United States Army Corps of Engineers to hand out pamphlets offering federal assistance for municipal infrastructure projects to bolster local communities across the nation.
The problem? The money didn’t always exist.
Some of the advertised services were not covered by an approved federal budget and amounted to empty promises, according to Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works Adam Telle.
This is just one of the many issues detailed by Telle’s “Building Infrastructure, Not Paperwork” initiative at a Pentagon roundtable discussion last week. He’s hoping to bring more efficiency to the department known most recently for its work in Southern California after the 2025 wildfires.
The 27 different initiatives aim to rein in bureaucratic bloat within the department. One of those initiatives is “consistency in communication of the president’s budget,” which would avoid more pamphlet mishaps by making it clear what the federal government can and cannot cover.
“Their mode has been out there to market to see ‘Hey, bring us more work. Bring us more work,’ instead of focusing on delivering the things that are nationally strategic,” Telle told The Daily Wire.
Other key initiatives outlined include scrapping “inactive projects,” improving prioritization, and ending contracts not considered beneficial.
In another example, he cited a Port Everglades project in South Florida with a price tag of $3.2 billion. In reality, it should have only cost $600 million to “deepen and widen” the key commerce hub.
“It’s because of all the processes and all the environmental concerns, all the, you know, lack of leadership to say ‘Hey, let’s be reasonable.’ Yes, we need to mitigate the environment, but it doesn’t need to cause a project to be 5X [the cost],” he said. “I mean, our competitors around the globe are not paying 5X for a port based on these types of concerns.”
It’s no secret that the Trump administration has been aiming to cut contracts and other efforts it has deemed unnecessary, most notably through the Department of Government Efficiency. Last April, War Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the War Department would scrap $5.1 billion in contracts.
“We need this money to spend on better health care for our warfighters and their families, instead of $500 an hour business process consultant,” Hegseth said at the time. “That’s a lot of consulting.”
The month prior, he had announced $580 million in cuts.
As for the engineering corps, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll stated that “continuous Army transformation is about rapidly delivering war winning capabilities to the Army today, not years in the future. But that’s not all; we’re also transforming at home, too.”
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