The US Army Corps of Engineers has long been one of the federal government’s key agencies in planning the uses of the nation’s waterways and water resources. The Corps’s two traditional programmes have been flood damage reduction and navigation enhancement. The nation’s water resource needs, however, have for decades been shifting toward restoration of ecosystem services and natural hydrologic variability. In response to these needs, legislation was enacted in 1990 that initiated the Corps’s involvement in ecological restoration, which is now on par with the Corps’s traditional flood damage reduction and navigation roles. This book provides an analysis of the Corps’s efforts in ecological restoration and offers broader recommendations on how the Corps might streamline their planning process. It also assesses the impacts of federal legislation on the Corps planning and projects, and provides recommendations on how to alter relevant federal policies in order to improve Corps planning. Another important shift affecting the Corps has been federal cost-sharing arrangements (enacted in 1986) that mandate greater financial participation in Corps water projects by local co-sponsors. The book describes how this affects the Corps-sponsor relationship and comments on how each group must adjust to new planning and political realities.