Sponsors $9 Million Increase for Pork-Saturated HIDTA Program

(Washington, D.C.) – Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today named Rep. Darlene Hooley (D-Ore.) the July Porker of the Month for introducing an amendment to add $9 million to the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program by cutting funds for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).  The House passed the amendment to the Transportation/Treasury/Housing & Urban Development appropriations bill (H.R. 3058) by a vote of 315 to 103. 

Administered by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), HIDTA’s original purpose was to target drug trafficking at five “gateway” border areas: Los Angeles; Houston; New York/New Jersey; South Florida; and the Southwest border.  In its 17 years of existence, the program has ballooned into a way for lawmakers to divert federal money to their home districts at the expense of stopping the influx of drugs across the border.  There are now 26 high-intensity areas, including in the Midwest and the Appalachian region, encompassing 25 percent of the U.S. population.  The result is an overly broad distribution of funding; federal dollars are spread so thinly that success in the most vital states has been negligible.  In fact, OMB’s Performance Rating Assessment Tool (PART) identified HIDTA as “ineffective.”  President Bush’s fiscal 2006 budget request called for a 56 percent cut in HIDTA, from $227 million to $100 million, and a consolidation of the program with the Department of Justice’s drug enforcement efforts.  The amendment to H.R. 3058 could be called “Hooley’s Revenge.”

Rep. Hooley invokes the faulty argument that methamphetamine production in her home state justifies the increase in HIDTA funding.  She cites what she calls the “meth epidemic” in Oregon and the need for more money to extinguish the “meth wildfire.”  But according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), laboratories in California and Mexico are the primary sources of the methamphetamine supply.  Oregon is not mentioned once in the methamphetamine section of the DEA’s report, “Drug Trafficking in the United States.”  While Oregon does not border on Canada, even if it did, the National Drug Intelligence Center stated in its 2005 National Drug Threat Assessment that “methamphetamine smuggling from Canada through and between point of entries along the Northern Border occurs at a very low level, and seizure data do not indicate any principal points of entry along this border.”  Meanwhile, Mexico remains the major supplier of heroin to the U.S. market, the largest foreign supplier of marijuana and methamphetamine, and accounts for 70 percent of estimated annual cocaine movement into the country.  HIDTA was not intended to hand out tax dollars to combat local meth labs; the program’s focus should be on the original “gateway” border areas.  

In May 2005, CAGW released Up in Smoke: ONDCP’s Wasted Efforts in the War on Drugs, which identified HIDTA grants as one of several expensive ONDCP programs that have failed to produce any meaningful results.

For helping expand a program’s reach into her home state to the detriment of its original mission, for adding funds to an ineffective program that was already fully funded, for cutting funds that would allow OMB to further identify wasteful programs through the PART, and for increasing local dependence on federal aid for fighting homegrown drug suppliers, CAGW names Rep. Darlene Hooley its Porker of the Month for July 2005.

Citizens Against Government Waste is the nation's largest nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government.