The most significant aspect of the reconciliation was that the two agencies had agreed to spend $1.9 billion of the taxpayers’ money (an estimate which would, as usual, turn out to be much too low) on a whole whose parts, according to their earlier testimony, would cancel out each other’s usefulness. The second most significant aspect was that the Bureau agreed to let the Corps go ahead and build its huge main-stem reservoirs first: “The Corps got the here and now,” says David Weiman, a lobbyist who would later be hired to fight several of the Bureau’s projects by the same farmers who were
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