Here Comes that Sinking Feeling!
April 21, 2008
by: Leslie K. Paige

Government WasteWatch, Spring/Summer 2008

On April 2, 2008, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) unveiled its 2008 Congressional Pig Book detailing 11,610 pork projects worth $17.2 billion (excerpts from the Pig Book begin on page 5). 

Pork-barreling, or earmarking, as it has become known, is the tip of a very dangerous iceberg.  It has an insidious and corrosive effect on the entire budget process: federal, state, and local.  

Indeed, for many, the rampant and unaccountable earmarking epidemic represents a shredding of the very fabric of an open and fair democracy.  Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said in a January 4, 2008 Washington Times commentary, “Instead of conducting our business in Congress with an eye toward what is best for the whole country, we fight about what is best for our next election and who can get the most taxpayer dollars for his state or congressional district. This is not how our Founders intended Congress to function…but the system of earmarking has taken our energy and diverted it away from solving national problems and wasted it on the task of steering tax dollars back home. Earmarking results in a terrible waste of taxpayer money, but the greatest cost is the wasted opportunity to address serious national challenges.”

There are good reasons why earmarking has a higher profile than ever.  In addition to their outrage over the “Bridge to Nowhere,” taxpayers are starting to connect the dots among earmarking by members of Congress, the hundreds of lobbying groups and their clients who benefit from those earmarks, and the well-timed political donations or fund-raisers that often occur in conjunction with securing a commitment for federal tax dollars.

CAGW, along with its stalwart allies on Capitol Hill, is not at all mystified by the public opinion polls that show that Congress is held in very low esteem by the general public.  The GOP, in particular, has begun to reap the electoral whirlwind as a result of its abandonment of fiscally sound principles and its headlong jump into the pork-free-for-all.

Some members of Congress, either as a defense mechanism or because they have truly seen the light, are swearing off earmarking.  According to the Club for Growth, 39 House members and seven senators have agreed to eschew earmarks, some for good and others for this session.  One unlikely convert, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), commented that when he arrived in Congress in the 1970s, there were few if any congressional earmarks.  “We have a problem in Congress,” Waxman told The Hill newspaper on February 12, 2008.  “Congressional spending through earmarks is out of control.” 

But every battle has its “dead-enders” and the congressional old guard clings to the vestiges of a dying earmarking policy.  Now that the old duck-and-cover method, typically employed by members after exposure of their embarrassing earmarking shenanigans, has begun to wear thin, members are resorting to more strident rhetoric to preserve the golden goose of earmarking by trying to legitimize the process.  Here are the most common memes and myths surrounding the earmark process that cropped up in the wake of the release of this year’s Congressional Pig Book:

What is the big deal?  $17 billion in earmarks constitutes .5 percent of the entire federal budget.  This is true.  However, the pursuit of earmarks consumes a disproportionate percentage of the time (and resources) of members of Congress and their staffs, not to mention a difficult-to-quantify portion of executive branch resources for budget and oversight officials, who are saddled with managing projects they didn’t request and that usurp more important projects. 

Day in and day out, congressional staff are faced with a parade of supplicants making their cases behind closed doors for boondoggle projects that have never seen the light of a congressional hearing or been subjected to a cost-benefit analysis.  The distortional effect of earmarking ripples down through state and local budgets as well.  A September 7, 2007 Department of Transportation Inspector General’s report documented how earmarks obviate other, more important infrastructure priorities. 

Some federal agencies have taken to setting aside large pools of federal funds that had been competitively awarded in the past, just to accommodate the add-ons they know will be tacked on by members of Congress.  Others have allowed their merit-based criteria for issuing competitive awards to lapse since so much of certain program budgets have been subjected to earmarking. 

Executive branch budget officials are so fed up with being stuck with earmarks that they have begun taking a portion of the total earmark funding to underwrite associated administrative oversight costs.  According to Omaha World Herald reporter Jake Thompson, “Agencies deducted a hodgepodge from the earmarks…The USDA’s Agriculture Research Service kept 10 percent and its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service kept from 2 percent to 19 percent. The Commerce Department ‘retains a portion’…The Administrative Agency on Aging withheld up to 1.3 percent for grant peer review…”

Understandable as it may be, this practice leads to even less accountability.  How does each agency determine its overhead costs?  Is there a uniform, reliable formula to determine those costs?  Where do those costs appear in the budget?  This sort of ad hoc accounting leads to more complexity and even less transparency in the earmark process. 

The relentless drive to obtain earmarks and to find new ways to skirt its own accountability rules perforce leads members of Congress to shirk their constitutional oversight responsibilities over current spending programs.   

Hey, back off -- the executive branch has earmarks, too (administratively-directed spending), so all we are doing is exercising our constitutional mandate to direct spending.  Besides, earmarking is more democratic.  Not so fast.  There is wasteful spending marbled throughout the federal bureaucracy, to be sure.  But Congress itself ensures that a massive portion of the statutory and regulatory code is devoted to putting elaborate (some might say obstructionist) systems into place to make sure that the vast majority of tax dollars are spent through formulas, competitively-awarded grants, merit-based grants, peer-reviewed grants, etc.  These systems are, at least theoretically, expected to be scrutinized and vetted and generally accessible to the public. 

For example, federal agencies must comply with the Freedom of Information Act (flawed as it is).  Congress is exempt.  Members of Congress furiously rejected CAGW’s attempt last year to force members to post their earmark request lists on their Web sites.  And Congress has repeatedly sought ways to skirt or gut entirely the rules signed into law on September 14, 2007 to improve earmark transparency.  Congressional earmarks are, by definition, secretive and unaccountable.  Therefore they are less democratic.  They are not expected to compete for resources based upon merit.  That is the very core of their attraction for members of Congress.

Members of Congress are better positioned than bureaucrats to understand the needs of their constituents.  This is also nonsense.  There is no inherent fairness in the congressional earmark system.  Earmarking has lead to a precarious blurring of the lines among federal, state, and local spending priorities.  It has also stimulated a growing appetite by state and local government officials to seek federal dollars to pay for projects that are of state or local interest only (bike paths, parking facilities, landscaping, theaters, museums, and industrial parks, among others.). 

It has become common practice for state and local governments across the country to pony up millions of their taxpayers’ dollars to send lobbyists to Washington, D.C. to raid the U.S. Treasury to underwrite boondoggles that state and local taxpayers have either rejected or wouldn’t be caught dead paying for if they had to use their own money.  Should all taxpayers be forced to prop up private corporations, academic institutions, questionable non-governmental organizations, and infrastructure boondoggles whose only source of income, in many cases, is federal dollars? 

In a May 21, 2008 article in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle about how Montana State University rakes in earmarks through its congressional delegation, reporter Gail Schontzler explained that the university sends its “President Geoff Gamble, Vice President for Research Tom McCoy, and sometimes scientists like Lee Spangler to Washington, D.C., to make the case for MSU projects.

MSU also hires a lobbying firm, Van Scoyoc Associates, which was paid $184,000 last year to represent the Bozeman campus and its three smaller sister campuses.  MSU leaders contend the firm’s main job is to track federal agencies’ research opportunities, not lobby Montana’s representatives.” 

House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha (D-Pa.) is notorious for encouraging companies to move to his district where he guarantees them an ongoing bounty of earmarks. 

Bottom line:  If members of Congress are so adept at surgically doling out federal dollars to worthy programs, why not just scrap the whole executive branch system and allow the legislators to earmark the entire $3 trillion budget?

The nation’s forefathers fully anticipated the eventuality of earmarking and had no problem with it; it’s practically an institution.  That chestnut, a favorite of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), is flat-out false.  In fact, the forefathers warned repeatedly of the dangers of earmarking.  James Monroe warned in 1822 that that federal money should be limited “great national works only,” and that their abuse was “productive of evil.”  Thomas Jefferson presciently predicted that pork would be a “source of boundless patronage to the executive, jobbing to members of Congress & their friends, and a bottomless abyss of public money.  You will begin by only appropriating the surplus of the post office revenues; but the other revenues will soon be called into their aid, and it will be a scene of eternal scramble among the members, who can get the most money wasted in their State; and they will always get most who are meanest.”

While most members of Congress fail to take the necessary steps to reign in earmarks, taxpayer groups and bloggers are doing all they can to fight for reforms.  The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste has a 12-point Earmark Reform Pledge, the Club for Growth is compiling a list of members who have pledged to forgo earmarks, and Americans for Prosperity has issued a one-year earmark moratorium pledge.  Other groups, such as the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, National Taxpayers Union, and Taxpayers for Common Sense, are generating publicity about wasteful earmarks.  Bloggers such as Porkbusters are also leading the online charge to keep taxpayers apprised of the latest outrage. 

In its mindless rampage for earmarks, Congress has turned a blind eye to the most pressing fiscal issues facing the country: the $9.3 trillion national debt, and the imminent financial train wrecks associated with dysfunctional, underfunded entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which are on an explosive trajectory. 

Unless citizens keep up a constant drumbeat demanding that Congress give up its addiction to earmarking, lawmakers will have no incentive to grapple with the critical issues of entitlement reform until those fiscal monsters are at the taxpayers’ doorsteps.  Nor will members of Congress return to the crucial tasks of evaluating, overseeing, and reforming huge federal spending programs.  Getting a pass on their profligate behavior, members of Congress are free to waste their time and more taxpayers’ money wallowing in the instant-gratification, feel-good, no-consequences pork-fest.