Montauk Inlet has become choked with so much sand that commercial fishing boats are unable to enter except around high tide. Larger fishing vessels have been idling outside the harbor for up to four hours waiting for a shot to return to the docks. This is an immediate risk and one that could be fatal if a boat goes aground in heavy seas and crew are lost overboard in the winter’s frigid water.
This is where the United States government has traditionally stepped in both financially and with expertise. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has had a plan for years to increase the inlet depth to 17 feet but that has not happened. In the interim Representative Nick LaLota said this week that he got an assurance from the Army Corps that it would pay for an emergency dredging to 12 feet. The cost has not been disclosed but could run into the millions.
The Montauk Inlet holdup is a good illustration of how Americans depend on the strength of the federal government to fund critically important work — the kind of necessities threatened by a two-headed presidency’s frenzied rush to cut spending. The Army Corps of Engineers is part of the Defense Department, therefore, somewhat immune as a whole to budget slashing. However, much of its work is localized, perhaps tempting the Musk-Trump team to cut it back.
The size of the agency could put it in Mr. Musk’s cross hairs. Approximately 34,600 civilians along with 650 members of the military make up the Army Corps. In addition to building levees and such, the corps has a research center where future risks and how to respond to them are assessed; its responsibilities include improving methods of measuring terrain, ice engineering, environmental quality, geotechnical engineering, and sophisticated computers and information systems. During disasters or wartime, its 249th Engineer Battalion generates and distributes electrical power as well as provides advice and technical assistance to affected areas.
The corps’s 2025 budget of $7.2 billion was authorized by Congress, and more than a third was allocated for the nation’s coasts and harbors. But that figure is deceptive; it is interesting to note that when whittled down, only $99 million remains for coastal storm damage reduction and just $4 million for pushing sand around on beaches, as the corps did to protect downtown Montauk after 2012’s Superstorm Sandy. This is peanuts compared to $500 million set aside for fish passage construction at Army Corps dams and $444 million for Everglades restoration. But even if its direct allocations are not cut, any large-scale work force reductions like those at the Agency for International Development could stifle the Army Corps, putting the brakes on projects like the Montauk Inlet.
The Army Corps’s Long Island megaproject, the Fire Island to Montauk Point Reformulation Study known as FIMP, has congressional authorization for $2.4 billion as part of the much larger and bipartisan Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013. That figure sounds like a lot, but as it spreads around it gets thinner, like butter on hot toast. For example, it could hand out grants for as many as 4,000 houses and other structures in coastal flood zones to be raised on new, breakaway foundations or pilings. At the moment even a modest pilot program to pay for elevating houses in Brookhaven and Babylon might be just the kind of thing the Musk team could target. A much more complicated effort to buy out and relocate houses and businesses in Montauk to higher ground would seem impossible in this political climate.
The Coast Guard station in Montauk Harbor makes the Montauk Inlet a national issue. There are two, interlocking responses: the emergency declaration that will release money for an immediate dredging to a depth of 12 feet, beginning, we are told, this week, and a planned project to reach 17 feet. In the larger undertaking, dredged sand would go on about 2,000 feet of waterfront west of the inlet, including in front of teetering houses along Soundview Drive. But there is always a caveat with the Army Corps that work is “subject to availability of funds.” This is alarming.
What Washington does matters right down to the safety of fishing vessels seeking shelter from a storm.