Message from the President: Mystery Memo Unveils Dirty Little Secret
April 22, 2008
by: Tom Schatz

Government WasteWatch, Spring/Summer 2008

On April 28, Washington Post columnist Jeff Birnbaum, a Fox News Channel political contributor who also wrote “The Lobbyists” and edits the Post’s “K Street” column, revealed the discovery of a six-page pro-earmark memorandum circulating on Capitol Hill.  This roadmap to earmark success was scintillatingly-titled “The Fairness of Congressional Earmarking in American Democracy:  A Comparison of the Distribution of FY 2008 Funding (via Congressional Direction) versus FY 2007 Funding (via Federal Agency Grants).”

Mr. Birnbaum called it the “hottest document on Capitol Hill,” in part because no one was sure who wrote it.  His suspicion was that it had been penned by “a lobbyist eager to justify his or her profession.”  At first, the columnist suspected a little-known group called The 302(b) Group, named after the section of the instructions that give congressional appropriations committee the ability to spend money.  (The magic words during consideration of the annual appropriations bills are, “how much is your 302(b) allocation?”)

Several days later, Mr. Birnbaum reported that he had gotten an e-mail from the president of the Ferguson Group, a lobbying outfit which identifies itself as the largest lobbying firm for local governments.  With revenue of $30.5 million, the company was ranked number 30 on the most recent list of “Washington’s Top Lobbying Firms” by the nonprofit group Public Integrity.  The group’s president informed Mr. Birnbaum that he had had his staff prepare the memo to “tell its clients why ‘they tended to get more money from congressional earmarks than from federal agencies left to their own devices.’” 
 
CAGW Media Director Leslie Paige, in a post about the memo on our blog, www.swineline.org, called it “a not-so-subtle primer of talking points for all the folks on the Hill” who can’t wait to meet with their favorite appropriators and give them their “wish-lists or projects they swear they cannot live without but which they would like someone else to pay for.”

Attacking the memo’s central argument that congressional earmarking is “more democratic” than the agency decision-making process, Ms. Paige sarcastically asked why, “when the congressional earmarking process is just so darned equitable and just, don’t we permit those selfless, noble lawmakers to earmark the whole darn federal budget? … Why are we bothering with competitive grant-making, and merit-based awards, formula grants, measurement benchmarks, inspectors general, the Government Accountability Office, federal agencies?  Doesn’t all this ‘democratizing’ through the holy sanctification of earmarks make you wonder why we even bother?”

It did not take a six-page memo to come to that conclusion since earmarks, by their nature, subvert that more open and deliberative process in federal agencies.  Indeed, that is what makes earmarks so attractive to the members of Congress who dole them out, and to those who receive them. 

States and localities are now perhaps the biggest supplicants for federal earmarks.  They are also exempt from the ethics rules passed last year that include a prohibition on gifts to members of Congress.  That means they can wine, dine, and lobby representatives and senators directly for their pork, instead of forcing local taxpayers to fork over their hard-earned money to hire highly paid lobbyists like those at the Ferguson Group.

Mr. Birnbaum deserves the taxpayers’ thanks for his investigative reporting into, as he called it, “the underworld of earmarking.”