In his new position, Dominy had an opportunity to learn anything he wanted about the three-hundred-odd Reclamation projects in existence. He read every project history, reserving for special attention the “bad elements”—the projects that were failing. “Half of our projects were insolvent. I was fascinated: why some and not others? I said to myself, ‘Whoever figures this out and starts to haul Reclamation out of this financial ooze is going to be the next commissioner.’ The reasons were complicated. In the early days, Reclamation made some bad mistakes—we miscalculated water availability, we
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