A Ditch by Any Other Name? Oh Yes, Please!

Take it as a sign that the federal bureaucracy has survived and thrived in Washington, despite the years of attacks upon it by former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

State Department spokesman Charles Redman divulged on Friday the official U.S. government name for the plan to build a four-mile-long ditch at the Mexican border near San Diego.

Are you ready for this? It’s known officially in Washington as the Dual-Purpose Border Security Enhancement Project and Drainage Ditch. If you like abbreviations, feel free to call it the DPBSEPADD.

The idea for the DPBSEPADD (sometimes nicknamed “The Ditch”) was unveiled here earlier this week. Bush Administration officials said that the DPBSEPADD is aimed at preventing illegal immigrants and drugs from crossing from Mexico into California near the port of entry at Otay Mesa.

At the State Department on Friday, Redman explained that the DPBSEPADD will also “resolve a problem that the Mexican government has asked us to fix, caused by drainage from new developments on the U.S. side.”

Hence the Dual-Purpose in the name. All very logical. But Redman, laughing as he announced the federal government’s official title for the ditch, claimed no pride of authorship, either for himself or for the State Department. Instead, he passed the buck to another agency.

“Let me just caveat this by saying, for the origin of the terms, you’ll have to ask the Immigration and Naturalization Service,” he said.

An immigration service spokesman, Silas L. Jervis, said he didn’t know where the official name for the ditch originated. “We refer to it regularly here as the Border Security Enhancement Project,” he said.

In a written statement Thursday, the Mexican Foreign Ministry had complained that Mexican officials had been led to believe that the ditch was aimed at solving drainage problems and not at stopping illegal immigration. But U.S. officials said that all the purposes for the ditch were made clear to Mexican officials at the International Boundary and Water Commission.

At that time, one U.S. official said Friday, the planned ditch was known as the “Vehicle Barrier and Drainage Facility.”