At a time of stark fiscal realities, you might think that our country’s lawmakers would want to cut the fat out of our federal budget. But just flip on C-Span and you’ll find that slashing deficits is the last thing on lawmakers’ minds.

This week, the House is taking up the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) of 2005, a bill packed with $10 billion worth of parochial construction projects for hundreds of congressional districts. The crown jewel in this glittering pile of pork is the $1.8 billion Upper Mississippi Lock Expansion project. This congressional spending spree makes MC Hammer look fiscally responsible.

Most of these projects are built by the Army Corps of Engineers, which has long been cast as an agency that doesn’t mind wasting taxpayer dollars. This is largely because the Corps’ budget is allocated based on a project-by-project basis, which creates a strong incentive to push for as many new projects as possible, regardless of whether they are justified.

The Upper Mississippi Lock Expansion project is no exception. Years ago, the Corps decided it wanted to add seven new locks on the Upper Mississippi River to help move grain down the river more quickly. (For those who don’t know, river locks allow barges to travel through otherwise non-navigable rivers.) The trouble is, there’s no reason for this “Cadillac” lock project. The Corps could ease congestion on the river with far cheaper “Chevy” solutions like better scheduling and congestion fees. What’s more, barge traffic on the Upper Miss has been stagnant or declining for the last 20 years. With Asia being the market for grain, farmers find that it makes more sense to move their product to West coast ports via rail rather than ship down the river and through the Panama Canal.

Like the game show “Jeopardy,” the Corps likes to come up with answers first and deal with pesky questions later. So when the Corps realized its lock expansion project was a waste of taxpayer money, the Corps cooked up the numbers to make its plans look worthwhile.

But the Corps’ accounting shenanigans haven’t gone unnoticed. In 2000, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) called out the Corps for using voodoo economics to justify building the new locks. The NAS wrote that the Corps grossly exaggerated future barge traffic and completely ignored alternative solutions, which in the Corps’ own analysis are shown to be more cost-effective than a lock expansion. In 2004, the administration criticized the Corps’ economic model for “failing to capture common sense human behavior, and being a poor economic tool for estimating benefits of inland waterway projects.”

Missouri’s politicians aren’t about to let the numbers get in the way – they’re all too happy to bring home the bacon for the “Show-Me” state. In an effort to please his home state’s special interests, Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) has ignored the economics and any shred of fiscal responsibility by relentlessly pushing for this project.

In comes a reasonable solution. Reps. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) have offered a compromise that’ll make the Corps put its money where its mouth is. They are planning to introduce an amendment to the water resources bill that will only allow the Corps to construct new locks if the Upper Miss carries an average of 35 million tons of cargo each year from 2007 to 2009 – the absolute minimum amount of traffic necessary to justify the locks. If the Upper Miss can’t reach a bar set this low, then the locks project should be killed once and for all.