Sen. Mary L. Landrieu announced Tuesday that she has placed a hold on the nomination of a top Army Corps of Engineers official, a move that comes after a White House veto threat of legislation funding levee protection.

At a news conference in New Orleans, the Louisiana Democrat said her “procedural hold” on the nomination of Lt. Gen. Robert Van Antwerp to be chief of the Army Corps of Engineers would be lifted when she gets assurances that Van Antwerp and the Bush administration “are ready to get serious about reforming the Army Corps’ bureaucracy.”

Landrieu formally announced the hold in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. The White House did not comment.

A Landrieu statement said Van Antwerp’s qualification “are not in dispute,” but instead cited a need to debate his nomination more thoroughly and provide funding for levee protection. She also noted that Congress had not reauthorized the Water Resources Development Act in seven years, although the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved a draft bill March 29 to reauthorize the law.

“I want to make sure that [Van Antwerp] puts people above red tape, safety above corner-cutting, and won’t allow endless delays and mindless procedures to threaten the future of our communities and our economy,” Landrieu said in a statement.

Earlier this year, Landrieu threatened to object to holding votes on amendments to an anti-terrorism billl (S 4) if the Senate did not pass a provision waiving a 10-percent match requirement by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for a disaster assistance program, which would save her state $1 billion.

She later relented, but successfully fought for inclusion of the provision in a $123.2 billion Senate version of the war supplemental spending bill (HR 1591). The bill also includes $1.3 billion in levee protection funding for the Army Corps of Engineers, which the White House Office of Management and Budget called “unnecessary” in a veto threat.

The White House statement noted that Bush’s supplemental request sought to reallocate $1.3 billion to restore levees in the New Orleans metropolitan area to the levels they were before Hurricane Katrina.