After the levee failures in New Orleans in 2005, Congress attached levee safety legislation to the Water Resources Development Act. Called in short, the National Levee Safety Act of 2007, the legislation ordered the Secretary of the Army to administer reforms and new programs including the creation of a:
1. national data base of federal and non-federal levees,
2. first-ever nationwide levee safety program,
3. levee safety inspection tool using global positioning technology,
4. sixteen member levee safety committee, and
5. program to inform the public of the risks of living near levees.
These new initiatives were to be completed from 2008 through 2013. Section 9006 of the legislation authorized the appropriation to the Secretary of $20 million for each year.
