It Would Cost $70 Billion to Fix the Nation's Levees. The Program Tracking Them Runs on Millions.

Louisiana has the largest leveed area of any state in the country — the system built and rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina to protect New Orleans and the surrounding parishes.▸ In most recent years the state has received about $1 million from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to inspect that system. In fiscal year 2024 it got $764,000. In fiscal year 2025 it got $691,000 — even as Jennifer Stephens, the Corps' own levee safety program manager, told NOLA.com that today's annual inspections involve "two people, three at most, with basically a two-page report, and you're done" — thinner than the multi-engineer reviews the same levees are supposed to get once every five years. It is one state's version of a national pattern: the machine meant to know whether a levee will hold is smaller than the risk sitting behind it.

A levee is an earthen wall — 97% of the nation's are, plus concrete and steel flood walls for the rest — built to hold a river or coastline back from the people who settled behind it.▸ The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' National Levee Database currently lists 6,149 levee systems totaling roughly 23,000 miles, protecting 23 million Americans, 7 million buildings, 5 million acres of farmland, and $2 trillion in property, across 2,296 communities. The average levee is 62 years old, built to engineering standards decades out of date.

Responsibility for those levees is scattered across the government.▸ In 2007 and again in 2014, Congress authorized the National Levee Safety Program, tasking the Corps and FEMA with four jobs: build a national inventory (the database above), write voluntary safety guidelines, help states and tribes stand up their own levee programs, and manage the levees the Corps owns directly. It is, in effect, the closest thing the country has to a nationwide levee safety inspector — and it depends on states and levee districts to actually walk the structures, because most levees aren't federal property at all. The database itself is, per the Congressional Research Service, "the most complete dataset on the nation's levees, although it is not comprehensive": plenty of small, privately maintained levees are not in it.

The database also doubles as an audit of how much of that inventory anyone has actually checked.▸ Per ASCE's 2025 Infrastructure Report Card, only about 31% of the nation's levees have ever received a formal risk assessment. Of those that have, 84% are rated low or very low risk — but 3% are rated high or very high, meaning a levee failure there would likely put lives at risk. The other 69% of the inventory is, functionally, unrated.

In 2018, USACE estimated it would cost $21 billion to improve and maintain just the levees in its own portfolio rated moderate, high, or very high risk — a fraction of the national network, since USACE owns or co-manages only a minority of it.▸ By 2021, ASCE's broader estimate to bring the entire national levee inventory into a state of good repair had reached $70 billion, and the group's 2025 report card notes that figure has likely grown since. A single proposed USACE levee rehabilitation project in Colorado Springs, Colorado, was projected in 2023 to cost more than $1 billion on its own.

Against that, the National Levee Safety Program's own statutory funding ceiling — reauthorized through 2028 by the Water Resources Development Act of 2022 — is $54 million a year.▸ Congress has not funded it anywhere near that level: the last time it appropriated new money for the program beyond keeping the database running, in 2020, it provided $15 million, per ASCE's accounting. Everything since has gone to database maintenance, not levee repair.

No state has more leveed area than Louisiana, and few states have a better reason to keep those levees checked: the failure of the New Orleans levee system during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is the reason the modern National Levee Safety Program exists at all.▸ Yet the annual money the state receives from the Corps specifically to inspect its federal flood-protection structures has fallen in each of the past two years for which figures are available — from a typical recent-year total of about $1 million, to $764,000 in fiscal 2024, to $691,000 in fiscal 2025, per NOLA.com's reporting on figures supplied by the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East and the Corps. U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, D-New Orleans, wrote to the administration asking for the funding restored. It is a separate Corps budget line from the National Levee Safety Program described above — Louisiana's money pays for the Corps' own periodic inspections of federal flood-control structures — but it shows the same shape: a levee-safety line item shrinking in a state that can least afford it to.

Dollar figures are drawn from the most recent editions of each cited source and are not adjusted to a common year; the ASCE and USACE rehabilitation estimates are stated in the dollars of their original estimate year, and federal/state allocations are in the dollars of the fiscal year enacted.