The 12/1/2025 Senate E&W bill, S.3293, appears to be taking a non-FCRA path to ‘bulletproofing’ restrictions on the ability of CWIFP to make loans to non-federal cost shares in dams and levees that have any federal ‘ownership’. Presumably, this is a preemptive move against the possibility that HR. 6229‘s FCRA amendment (either with original language or variation thereof) is enacted and the FCRA Criteria are subsequently revised or superseded.
In one sense, this is a positive development — a non-FCRA approach to the issue seems an acknowledgement that the FCRA Criteria ploy was a too-clever-by-half gimmick. More importantly, now the debate is back in the real world, away from the mysteries of federal budgeting and FCRA law, and back to considering the actual pros and cons of CWIFP finance for genuinely non-federal cost shares in federally involved projects, including those which involve the Corps in a major role.
And S. 3293’s provisos might be seen as a good-faith invitation to have that debate. The restrictive language is focused on current federal ‘ownership’ of a project, not past ownership or the nebulous ‘involvement’ standard of the FCRA Criteria. There might be valid policy (or even ideological) reasons that dams and levees important enough for a local community that they’re looking to federally finance a big cost-share in them ought not to be permanently owned by the federal government. The subject is above my pay grade, but I can see why there might be equally well-intentioned, if differing, perspectives on it.
Still — the hint of a ‘white whale’ obsession lingers. Could it be that S. 3293’s provisos are simply an end run around the likelihood that a FCRA amendment will sooner or later be enacted, to prepare a new ‘front’ in the battle to severely restrict CWIFP eligibility to its most natural borrowers? Just to win the battle, not for a policy perspective, but for some unfathomable private reason or (at this point) no reason at all. The $5m funding for dams and levees, which CWIFP doesn’t need, looks suspiciously like a pretext to add provisos, some of which are retrospective to CWIFP’s carryover funding. The relentless repetition of lists and multiple ways to restrict federal ownership (including amending the definition of ‘project — really?) seem to go beyond lawyerly practice and into some sort of, well, ‘pounding’ on a hated object.
I really don’t know — it’ll be interesting to see how this develops.