Federal Science Sinks in Swamp

As I predicted back in 1999 in a feature article I wrote on the Everglades restoration scheme in The American Enterprise, the feds quite literally do not know what they are doing when it comes to this $8 billion (and counting) project. A National Research Council (NRC) study, the Miami Herald reports, concludes that the government doesn't know nearly enough about the underlying science and facts of the Everglades system to be confident that the results of this federal meddling will be any more satisfactory than the late '40s Army Corps jiggering of the Everglades -- the results of which we are spending $8 billion (at least) now to "fix." The NRC, being a government agency, naturally concludes that we just need to spend more billions on the science -- not that the government simply should refrain from launching itself on such hubristically ambitious and expensive projects through a fog of ignorance.