Despite feverish lobbying from the barge industry and its client businesses, Congress appears unlikely to finish packing a new barrel of water-projects pork before Christmas. Taxpayers should be thankful for the failure. In this case, a do-nothing outcome is the best that can be expected.

After winning House and Senate approval for the first time in six years, the Water Resources Development Act is stalled in conference committee, and a key reason for the deadlock appears to be continued disagreement over "reforming" oversight of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Senators approved mild adjustments in a shameful status quo, creating a layer of independent but nonbinding review for projects costing more than $40 million, but even this was too much for the House to stomach.

Meanwhile, the legislation's price tag kept growing. Where the House approved a collection of projects costing $11 billion, and the Senate signed off on a list totaling $12 billion, the conference committee reportedly has found justification for upping the price tag to $18 billion.

Even the cheapest version was too expensive for the White House, but it is unlikely to back these objections with a veto or even strong lobbying of its own. After all, these bills are compilations of navigation improvements, flood-control construction and other public works nearest and dearest to the current Republican majorities, larded with enough gifts to Democrats to ensure comfortable majorities and justify claims of bipartisanship support.

Alaska's "bridge to nowhere" was the leading example of this foolishness until publicity forced its deletion. But our favorite remains the $3.8 billion — one-third of the House total — for Corps projects along the Mississippi and Illinois rivers.

The centerpiece among these is construction of seven 1,200-foot locks in place of, sometimes in addition to, the current 600-footers, in order to shorten the transit times for barge loads of grain and other goods. We have been skeptical about this idea since its birth as mere billion-dollar program — but then so were the Corps' own economists, until they were directed to come up with favorable cost-benefit figures.

Six years later, this books-cooking scandal is still cited as an example of the need for independent oversight of the Corps. But the locks project itself remains alive and well. Indeed, it has now nearly doubled in cost to $1.8 billion, and been augmented with another $2 billion in environment-minded repairs to the rivers, as a way of buying broader congressional and public support. Never mind that demand for barge-shipping capacity on these waterways appears to be in steady decline.

The bills also provide for reconstruction in coastal Louisiana and Mississippi to repair damage from Hurricane Katrina, and no doubt these sections will be cited in coming weeks to justify speedy action on the overall package. But we think the better course is to leave this mess for sorting out by the next Congress — which should then turn its attention to real reforms in the entire process by which such projects are proposed, evaluated and approved.